Collaboration: The hallmark of today’s technology-embedded classrooms must be increased communication opportunities along with collaboration. In Three Steps to Leverage Technology for Dual Language or ELL Strategies, you can see that these uses transcend technology and enable powerful, interactive activities that can be done at a distance. Try having students create a multimedia anthology of digital stories that can be read, viewed, and listened to across the globe. Another example involves students nationwide gathering and analyzing data via cloud spreadsheets.

Amplify Student Voices: Powerful learning occurs when we hear our own voice in the world. Affirming students’ ability to impact social justice issues in their community helps them develop their voice. Going digital on a world stage can transform lives in an instant for good or ill.

Achieving the Impossible

Technology also makes possible the difficult or impossible. One example includes creating lifelong electronic portfolios and another is augmenting learning.

Lifelong Electronic Portfolios: As learners, most work disappears at the end of class. Creating lifelong e-Portfolios enables learners to achieve greater insight into what and how they learn. It also forces reflections on learning. Find out more: e-Portfolios | Picture Portfolios

Empower the Previously Difficult or Impossible: Technology enables us to learn in ways previously impossible. Consider technologies like an iPad and Moticonnect, which fellow blogger Richard Byrne highlights through a guest post by Maggie Keeler and EdTechTeacher. MotiConnect augments what may have been done in the past.

Over on Facebook, I’m making a special effort to keep the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) closed group going with fresh tips and content. When I started facilitating MIE sessions earlier this year (I’ve had a chance to facilitate 10 across Texas), one of the challenges was reconciling who would be attending at these events. As you might imagine, community building can be tough, albeit rewarding, work. I’m always inspired by Sarah of Edumatch fame, not to mention many others.

My goals were simpler–to build a community of Texas educators, and sure, why not, a few folks from outside Texas. The community had to tap into a need for educators to be heard, to have a place to share their ideas. Robyn H. inspired the Facebook closed group since she has a group for US Microsoft Innovative Educators. I had already tried, unsuccessfully, to create a Voxer group, Skype group, Diigo group. The idea came one session when I asked the audience, “How many Facebook users are there here?” and the whole audience raised their hands. Facebook, not Twitter, was the virtual space teachers, principals, technology directors seemed to inhabit.

“Figure out which toys your friends can play with,” I remember my Mom saying to me before a sleepover with classmates. “And put the ones you don’t want to see damaged, lost, or stolen away.” It’s advice that I took to heart and shared with my own children before they had friends over. Here’s some advice you may want to consider before deploying Chromebooks in schools…or, consider leaving your “best practices” in the comments.

Best Practice #1 – Establish procedures before issuing Chromebooks.

Setting ground rules can certainly help you avoid trouble and heartache down the line. The advice is definitely worth taking when it comes to inviting students and staff to use any kind of device, even durable Chromebooks, in your classroom, library, or school. TCEA member Erin Laughlin (@MrsErinLaughlin) recommends that you consider your responses to questions like the ones below:

How will students be issued Chromebooks?

How should students be advised to transport Chromebooks?

What happens when there is a substitute teacher in the room? Will students be permitted to take advantage of the Chromebook?

What should be done when a Chromebook suffers damage?

In response to the last question, one teacher in Fairfield ISD during their Eagle Leadership Academy,pointed out that damage had occurred to a school-owned Chromebook issued to a student. “What did you do?” I asked, wondering if the student was to be forced to reimburse the district or forced to replace the device. “We made sure it wasn’t malicious and then just worked to get it fixed or replaced. No action was taken since this was an accident.” Erin also suggests having rules like these in place:

No food or drinks should be in sight when Chromebooks are out.

Carry Chromebooks with two hands at all times.

Do not get a Chromebook if teacher is out of the room.

Nothing should be on the desk except the Chromebook unless told otherwise.

Students should only be on websites assigned or approved by teacher.

Have students and parents sign a statement saying they will abide by the rules.

Have reasonable consequences for students who aren’t following the rules (taking away the Chromebook should be your last resort).

As you might imagine, some common-sense suggestions include assigning a student to be in charge of the Chromebooks, ensuring monitoring of issuance and receipt of devices by class members. Also, consider including a Google Form to let students report how a Chromebook was damaged. Another point to consider is to be sure to label your class Chromebooks so they will be easy to locate in case they leave your classroom. Finally, Kim from Fairfield ISD suggests that the teacher and students get in the habit of plugging in Chromebooks correctly so they are charged for the next group.

“You can’t issue students devices until they’ve had digital citizenship lessons required by eRate.” And, of course, digital citizenship lessons also ensure that you can discuss important issues about caring for other people’s equipment. In my experience, students often take great care of equipment issued to them when there is a culture of care cultivated in the school as a whole. Keys aren’t ripped off keyboards in classrooms where the teacher makes every effort to care for his/her technology and assigns students the jobs of cable management, removing dust from devices, and cleaning keyboards/screens. Yet every device brings its own challenges, and Chromebooks are no different. Providing an overview of Chromebook and Google Apps tips ensure that students feel confident in using new technologies, rather than frustrated.

Best Practice #3 – Promote collaboration.

“My two favorite tools for a 1-to-1 classroom,” I shared at the recent Tots and Technology Conferences that took place in Galveston and Frisco this past summer, “include Nearpod.com and Seesaw.com.” Each of these provides critical tools that you need as a teacher to share your screen and presentations with students, as well as collect their work. Nearpod serves as a presentation and eyeball management tool for you, pushing your screen out to all student Chromebooks. Seesaw serves as a digital portfolio that collects students’ digital and physical work in one virtual space that is easily shared but manageable.

Let’s quickly explore some other top tips for promoting collaboration:

Quiz tools: Other ways to engage students include quizzing tools like Quizizz.com and Kahoot.com. Quizizz allows students to login with their Google account, and all completed assignments are reported and available in Google Classroom.

Easy video assessment: Use tools like EdPuzzle and/or FlipGrid to take already existing videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, etc. or put your own online, then add your voice and questions to create an interactive video lesson. You’ll be able to see how many times your students watch your interactive video lessons, how many times they attempt a question, and the responses given.

Use Google Classroom to create a virtual classroom presence for students, blending in Google Calendar and YouTube videos to facilitate online learning.

Use badges in your classroom: TCEA member Joe Camacho (@CamachoEdTech) recommends setting up and issuing badges to celebrate student learning and sharing. Students can learn Google Apps tools such as Sites, Classroom, Forms, Docs, Drawings, and Slides, as well as other tools in use like DocHub, Flubaroo, Edpuzzle, Kahoot, Quizizz, creating screencasts, and Padlet.

Another neat tip for promoting collaboration and sharing comes from Erin Laughlin again. She suggests creating a “shark tank” in your classroom, having older students create products that are evaluated by younger students serving as “the sharks.” Older students pitch their solution to a problem using Google Hangouts, bridging the distance between their classroom at one campus and another. Of course, this activity can also be done at even greater distances. If that is of interest, consider the Connecting for a Cause website, where students create a Google Sites web presence that represents their cause.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Are you an educator fascinated with creating videos that feature great content, are available on popular media sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo), and feature YOU as the chief learning strategist and interpreter? What’s more, new tools make it easy to annotate videos. Annotating videos involves layering text, links, and comment bubbles into an existing video.

EdPuzzle makes it straightforward to add notes and assessments to videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, Learn Zillion and others. This enables understanding checks. There’s also an iOS app you and/or your students can use.

VideoAnt, a web-based video annotation tool, also allows for annotations or comments to web-hosted videos.

This online annotation tool, Swivl’s Recap, is a student response and reflection app. Teachers can prompt students to respond to questions and students respond in video via their mobile device of choice. Watch this overview of Recap via TeacherCast.

Flipgrid works a little differently from the tools above, empowering you to create video-based discussion groups. The teacher posts videos and students respond to those. The “video group” can be passworded via a pin code, and then made accessible online via a web site.

3 Student VideoNotes ToolsLooking for tools that allow your students to take notes about videos? Check out this blog entry by Richard Byrne. In it, he highlights these tools:

“What level of cognitive complexity are students operating at,” asks Dr. Chris Moersch, “when using technology in the classroom?” Technology, asserts Dr. Moersch, needs to be used to think and reason. “It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it (spending on technology) if you’re using it at a low level,” says Dr. Desiree Marks-Arias. “What is the potential for using technology at its highest level?”

What an exciting conversation about the English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS) and technology in the classroom!

To what extent are we positioning ESL (English as a Second Language) students to become college and career ready? According to the Alliance for Effective Schools, “About 63 percent of the 46.8 million job openings created by 2018 will require workers with at least some college education….” Traditional approaches to pedagogy often leave the ESL population underserved in preparation of post-secondary pursuits. Beyond analyzing traditional achievement gaps between student groups, including those who receive program services such as ESL, Special Education (SPED), and Gifted and Talented (GT), it is pivotal that equal attention be given to curricular and instructional gaps as they relate to (1) the integration of 21st century skills into core subjects and (2) pedagogical approaches that emphasize collaborative learning, technology proficiency, and problem-solving.

Identifying appropriate methods and strategies to narrow and eliminate such gaps requires a fundamental shift in our existing paradigm—observing achievement and instructional gaps not as indicators of student deficiency, but rather as opportunities for supporting and developing student learning and success—addressing “support gaps.” In essence, by evaluating support gaps, we can determine the effort and resources necessary for teaching, learning, and academic mastery. Source:The Support Gap: Supporting and Developing Teaching and Learning for ESL

Travel back in time with me to Thursday, June 9, 2016, when I had the opportunity to explore a topic that goes to the heart of equity in bilingual/ESL classrooms. That topic is the gap between how we approach teaching and learning in English Language Learner (ELL) Classrooms. Certainly, if you are an ESL/ELL/Dual Language teacher, or you are an administrator responsible for supporting ELL students, you will want to listen to this conversation. Be aware that this podcast is quite long at almost an hour in length.

“People are living in an unprecedented condition,” shares the 2014 Pew Research Report on The Future of Privacy, “of ubiquitous surveillance.” And, although we are now in 2016, did you know that 2014 was known as the Year of the Hack, according to CNet?

“The tone was set in January as we learned details about the Target credit card breach, along with a Snapchat hack that revealed millions of user phone numbers,” shared CNet. Safeguarding sensitive data has grown even more important. Since then, there have been many more hacks, including the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack, which stopped the release of “The Interview;” perhaps we should be grateful for that. Of greater concern, though, is the loss of student and staff personally-identifiable data (PII).

The loss of PII is signaled by facts like the following:

97% of stolen computers are NEVER recovered.

Direct costs are incurred by school districts for having to notify individuals whose confidential data has been compromised, as well as notify credit agencies.

The cost of paying for credit protection for individuals is affected.

The school district may suffer damage to reputation.

Staff may be disciplined or terminated, depending on the severity of the data breach.

The failure to understand how to safeguard sensitive data means that districts who suffer a data breach have no recourse—they must pay to protect against identity theft. Yet, if every staff member practiced the following tips, data could be easily safeguarded.

Lock or log out of your computer when you leave it alone. Going to lunch? Going down the hall to the restroom? Make sure to secure your computer or device. Don’t leave it logged in, even if you’re just on your web browser checking out the lunch menu.

Never use work email for personal purchases and/or items. Aside from being “discoverable” during public records or legal proceeding (which you may not even know is happening), you should use a different email for finances. Move your financial management to another email system.

Use two-factor authentication for emails and other services. “Two-factor authentication is a simple feature that asks for more than just your password. It requires both “something you know” (like a password) and “something you have” (like your phone)” (source: LifeHacker). Two-factor works on sites like Google, LastPass, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote, Paypal, Steam,Microsoft, Yahoo (avoid them), Amazon, LinkedIn, and WordPress. This will help prevent unauthorized use of your account unless they have your username, password, AND your smartphone.

Don’t read spam messages; delete them un-opened. Most email providers (like Gmail) have a way of marking messages as spam. But sometimes, spam slips through those filters they’ve set up to catch unwanted email. That means it’s up to you. Some spam is obvious; others are more clever.

Access confidential data on your work device ONLY. If you work from home, make sure that you encrypt confidential data on your mobile device (e.g. laptop) for travel (yes, even for that short trip from work to the grocery store to home). If you decrypt confidential data, make sure to shred it off your computer (it’s easy to recover deleted files). Apple Macs come with “Secure Empty Trash,” and on Windows, you can use the free File Shredder program.

Do not put unencrypted confidential data on a USB flash drive or external hard drive or CD-ROM. This is the source of many a confidential data breach!

Secure your smartphone and remove confidential/sensitive data from your personal mobile phone after each use. Lots of folks use their smartphones to access work details. Make sure you protect that by a) Putting a passcode on your phone, or better yet, encrypting your phone’s storage with a password; b) Shredding data on your Android phone (get SSE app for free) or, if on iOS, useReaddle Documents (free) with a passcode and encryption, which adds another layer of protection. And finally, AVOID saving confidential data on your smartphone from your email (and any emailed confidential data should be encrypted. See Part 2 for more tips.).

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“How can I connect OneNote Class Notebook assignments to Microsoft Classroom Assignment grades?” What a fantastic question to have pop up in the no-cost TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) session I facilitated in Wichita Falls, Texas earlier this summer. In this blog entry, I am going to recap some of the conversations and provide responses to the questions that popped up during the session.

Microsoft Classroom has many features and benefits, bringing the full force of Office 365 suite (including online versions of Word, Powerpoint, Excel, as well as Outlook, Group Conversations, and, the jewel in the crown of Microsoft’s education offerings, OneNote Online), as well as the installable, full-blown versions of these products.

Selecting Your Tool

In the Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) one-day Teacher Academy, one of the points that is shared is the importance of students being able to select their own tools as appropriate for the job. This, for me, goes to the heart of what it means to be a learner, an artisan, a craftsman at work. You have to learn enough to know what technologies can be used to create the effect you are seeking when communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving with others. Microsoft, like its competitors Apple and Google, brings a wealth of tools to the table. Those tools include the following:

Microsoft Classroom – This provides a virtual space, a classroom where interactions with students can begin and be managed. It is accessible online to students and staff in a school district domain (although I’ve made the suggestion to Microsoft that they make it so that anyone external to a domain can be a part of it, so that those engaging in professional development can access content as part of a class). You can get to it online here. Some possible uses include:

Assignments can be set and students can submit work created in Word on their computer or the Word Online version and then share a link back with the teacher.

Assignments can be “turned in” by students, then graded by the teacher, who simply has to access each student’s assignment in one place and then add notes and a grade.

All assignments end up in the Classroom Outlook calendar, which is a component of the MS Classroom.

MS Classroom has several components “baked into it,” including:

Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook – This provides access to the premier Classroom resources for staff and students. It can serve a variety of purposes, such as a jointly-managed ePortfolio for student work, a way to disseminate assignments created in Classroom, as well as any handouts (a.k.a. Content Library) materials created by the teacher that the students can copy to their own section. This student section is specific to each student and only the student and teacher have access. Furthermore, Class Notebook features a Collaboration space where students can work together on documents and whiteboards.

But wait, there’s even more greatness! In addition to all of this interactivity, students can access OneNote Class Notebook on any device, although the MS Surface and iPad versions allow for interactivity and digital ink possibilities. If you’re not familiar with digital ink, this means you can actually write on any document you have rights to in the Class Notebook. Consider these scenarios:

Students can use a Cornell Notes Planner and fill it out.

The teacher can share a copy of a PDF or document (e.g. quiz, graphic organizer) and students can fill it out by hand using a stylus and tablet.

The teacher can snap a picture of a form or insert a PDF version as a print-out of a document, then share it out to students for completion. Also, students can do the creating for peers and their lead learner, the classroom teacher.

As a teacher, you can create and grade assignments (wow!) from within OneNote Class Notebook that get sent (or synchronized) to your connected Learning Management System (LMS), such as Microsoft Classroom. Make a change in MS Classroom assignment for a grade, and it gets adjusted in the Class Notebook.

Online versions of the Office Suite – This includes a variety of tools, such as Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.

Microsoft Office Mix – This turns on many great features for both students and educators alike, enabling them to add audio, video, screencasting (great for flipped classrooms!), and more into interactive elements.

Microsoft Snip – Quickly capture images of your device (a.k.a. screenshots) and then annotate them with audio, highlighting, and text.

To see MS Classroom and OneNote Class Notebook in action, check out these videos for a walkthrough.

Microsoft Classroom Videos

MS Classroom Big Picture View. In this video, explore MS Classroom and its various aspects. We take a quick look at Assignments and Calendar. We’ll begin exploring Class Notebook and how it interfaces with MS Classroom.

MS Classroom and Setup of OneNote Class Notebook. Setting up OneNote Class Notebook. Continued exploration of MS Classroom, Conversation, File space, and more. We also discuss the different OneNotes that exist, including OneNote Online, OneNote 2016, and the free app, OneNote.

MS Classroom and Connecting OneNote ClassNotebook. In this, we look at Class Notebook in more detail, including how to connect your Class Notebook on OneNote 2016 to your MS Classroom Learning Management System (LMS) (as well as others). That way, when you record grades in Class Notebook, they are reflected in your MS Classroom Assignments area, and vice versa!

For the eighth time, I tried to run the function that moved a turtle across my screen, hoping that it would finally draw a hexagon. It worked! Like a gold medalist, I stared in shock at the screen with a smile slowly spreading on my face. For me, it was a personal moment of achievement. Since age thirteen, when I first tried to enter a program copied from Nibble magazine, I’d tried to craft and compile computer programs (a.k.a. coding), often without success.

Yet here I was at the Creative Coding through Games and Apps (CCGA) being successful. Could there finally be hope for non-programmer types like me? With Touch Develop, the answer is a resounding YES. And you can bet your students will find this an engaging tool as they learn how to develop code that works.

Upcoming Opportunity:Register to attend the free TCEA Introduction to Creative Coding through Games and Apps on December 2, 2016 in Austin, Texas. This six-hour teacher academy provides an orientation to the Creative Coding through Games and Apps (CCGA) course curriculum and an introduction to the Touch Develop platform and online CCGA tutorials. The CCGA curriculum is intended for middle and high school classrooms, and no previous computer science or coding experience is needed. By attending, you’ll receive access to the curriculum which provides everything you need to deliver the content to your students in a variety of ways. You’ll also receive teacher prep materials, lesson plans, presentations, student assignments, homework, projects, and tests. If you have any questions about the training and/or CCGA curriculum, please contact Miguel Guhlin at mguhlin@tcea.org or 512-450-5392.

Why Learn to Code?

While many have argued that children need to learn to program, I previously found few reasons compelling. There are many ways to develop hands-on, minds-on opportunities to solve real-world problems. It wasn’t until earlier this year when the significance of IoT smacked me between the eyes. When you stop to think that there will be over 50 billion devices connected by 2020, a phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (a.k.a. IoT and/or the Internet of Everything (IoE)), and that each of those devices needs to be programmed for use, you may realize how critical learning to code is. Yet many students often don’t learn how to program until they are in high school, and only a few take it up or excel at it. That’s what makes Touch Develop, a way of creating programs on any device (e.g. Chromebook, Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, and Windows), such a powerful innovation to implement in schools today.

Listen to these two brief Voxercasts I recorded with the gentlemen who introduced me to CCGA:

What Makes Touch Develop Coding So Special?

“Dad,” asked my six-year old son a few years ago (he’s now 17), “I want to grow up to be a programmer and write games.” When I introduced him to MIT’s Scratch, he quickly lost interest. It was hard to imagine how Scratch, he told me later, would help him write a computer game like Medal of Honor or Command and Conquer, games that inspired him to want to learn to program. Touch Develop provides an approachable way to code that also manages student expectations and helps address the social and teaming aspects of game development. In this cross-platform, mobile coding environment, “Students learn by doing, creating simple games and apps.” Touch Develop, though, comes with a powerful, yet easy-to-follow curriculum chock-full of video tutorials and guided programming that can be completed on any device. This cross-platform goodness is accompanied, for the teacher, with an entire ecology of resources that educators and students can rely on. What’s more, Touch Develop provides an online, graphic-oriented, touch-screen-oriented development environment. You can develop on a computer, but any mobile device with enough screen real estate available will work, including Google Chromebooks. Simply put, whether you have iPads or Chromebooks as your device of choice, there’s little reason why students could not create and share their creations with others.

What Does Touch Develop Look Like?

Notice in the two screenshots below, you first watch a tutorial and then “try out” the coding on your own. Fortunately, for those of us who may not be exactly great at writing code, Touch Develop provides an interactive tutorial. While you can work independently when writing a script, you also have an “expert at your elbow” to help you get it done.

If above we see a tutorial, when you click “let’s do it!” you are taken to a screen where you can do just that. Notice the “tap there” instructions that guide you, step by step, in developing the code by tapping on elements at the bottom of the screen to create ideas. Over time, I found myself beginning to understand what was happening in the script, which never happened before. Somehow, this approach has overcome my “math block,” easing me over the rough spots when I got stuck. That makes me confident that grades 6-12 students will be able to learn Touch Develop and use it to achieve quick success, creating a game or anything else.

For example, while “writing” a program, users are encouraged to use the touch screen on their mobile device (making code development on devices students have a real possibility). When complete, students are able to quickly publish and share their creations with others. Touch Develop relies on HTML5 for maximum compatibility across devices, making students’ creations usable and playable by all.

As you might imagine, this friendly programming environment is very different from the old approaches to programming that often reminded me of a blank page in a text editor. You are never alone without help and support in Touch Develop, which is invaluable to non-programmers who need scaffolded support to code.

How Can I Get My Students Started?

“Touch Develop,” shares Paul, the session facilitator and teacher at a recent Creative Coding through Games and Apps (CCGA) I attended, “tends to spread like wildfire. This course was built for grades 6-9 and has been used with 3rd-4th grade students as well. Others have used it as an after-school club.” It’s easy to see why that’s true because CCGA curriculum provides the support those teaching and learning Touch Develop need. As I worked my way through the tutorials and scripts, creating programs while grappling with coding concepts and FAILing forward (FAIL = First Attempt in Learning), I realized that schools had everything they needed to implement a complete course for students, as well as an environment rich enough to be used grades 3-16. The CCGA curriculum is available as a OneNote Notebook, making it easy to interact with, as well as Docx and PDF files divided up into units and lessons. Little is left to chance or to the teacher to develop.

Creative Coding through Games and Apps is a first-semester course for introduction to programming for the early secondary grades. The course is designed to attract and reach a broad and diverse range of students, including those who may have never before considered programming. Students learn how to code by working in a real software development environment to design, program, and publish mobile apps and games. Learning to code by creating real products, students discover how to make amazing things and have an impact on their world. Creative Coding through Games and Apps can be delivered with success by any teacher, regardless of computer science background. Featuring online and in-class lessons that emphasize hands-on coding, the course can be taught via any modern web browser on phones, tablets, laptops, or desktop computers. The combination of online plus in-class resources provides flexibility in teaching style, allowing educators to choose the right balance for their students of in-class instruction and out-of-class study. The course length is flexible, deliverable in 6, 9, 12, 18 weeks or more, depending on the time available in your school.

While learning management systems (LMS) of yesteryear (e.g. Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai) remain powerhouses of centralized control for educators, most of the teachers I speak to are no longer interested.

It’s as if they are saying, “Ok, why does virtual class management have to be so difficult? I want simple solutions that help me get my work done rather than force me to learn arcane workflows.” As a result, we’ve seen educators eschew solutions like Edmodo, ever on the hunt for the easiest, most powerful tool.

Consider new classroom tools as the latest iteration of learning management systems. For example, Moodle and Blackboard provided one iteration, Edmodo and Schoology another, and now Google Classroom and Microsoft Classroom are the latest iteration. Let’s explore this most recent iteration.

Update: Since this blog entry was first submitted for publication, both MS Classroom, OneNote Class Notebook and Google Classroom have released powerful new updates that may not be reflected in the feature list below. For example, OneNote Class Notebook now has a “take it on the go” feature. Click links above for more info about each. More video tutorials will be added below to illustrate features so be sure to check back from time to time!

What Is Classroom?

The goal of any virtual classroom system, or LMS 3.0, involves providing a suite of online tools that empower students and staff to connect, create, collaborate, and facilitate organization. Microsoft Classroom, like Google Classroom, offers integrated word processing, spreadsheet, slideshow presentation, and cloud storage. Yet it goes one step further with OneNote Class Notebook, facilitating the grading of assignments and full integration with MS Classroom Assignments. MS Classroom, by itself, is a powerful classroom collaboration tool. But add OneNote Class Notebook,and you’ve made it simple for educators to distribute assignments, draw/use digital ink to create and annotate content (e.g. an algebra teacher writes the pythagorean theorem with a stylus or the tip of her finger on the screen and OneNote’s “ink to text” feature converts it into typed text). Then you can add audio comments and feedback to student work along with digital ink feedback.

Features and Benefits

Both Google and Microsoft have a wealth of features. Let’s take a peek, adapting this support document to facilitate a feature comparison. I’ve also added components (e.g. MS Snip/video links to the MS Classroom side or links to Google’s support page) to the “Yes” response if they include items readers new to MS Classroom may be unaware of.

Add materials to your assignments, such as YouTube videos, a Google Forms survey, PDFs, and other items from Google Drive. Teachers and students can draw on, write notes, and highlight documents and PDFs in the Classroom mobile app.

Keep students organized—Classroom creates a Calendar for each class, adding assignment due dates to the calendar. Students can view upcoming work in multiple places.

Yes, create assignment due dates and see those appear in calendar immediately. Students can view upcoming assignments, as well as review completed ones. Students also have a “Mark Done” option they can select and that turns the work in.MS Classroom also features a private “chat” between teacher and student for feedback regarding a particular assignment.

Keep teachers organized—Review student work, including assignments, questions, grades, and previous comments. View work by one or all classes, and sort by what needs reviewing.

Yes, one place to review assignments, student comments/questions, as well as the option to view items in OneNote Class Notebook.

Yes. Review student work, including assignments, questions, grades, and previous comments. View work by one or all classes and sort by what needs reviewing.

Grade quickly and easily—Sort students by first or last name, see who has turned in work, draft grades to share with students later, add private comments when returning work.

Yes.

Yes. Sort students by first or last name, see who’s turned in work, draft grades to share with students later, and add private comments. Plus, add annotations and visual feedback to student work in the Classroom mobile app.

Transfer grades—Export final grades to spreadsheet format or to a CSV file for upload elsewhere.

Affordable and secure—Like other services, Classroom contains no ads and never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes.

Yes.

Yes.

One sign-in—Teachers and students can sign in to Classroom with a single sign-on.

Yes.

Yes.

Professional development —Get your teachers using Classroom quickly with free online training.

Yes. Professional learning online is available and a click away in OneNote Class Notebook.

Yes.

Personal data protection—Classroom is covered.

Yes.

Yes.

*More on MS School Data Sync:“School Data Sync imports school roster data from the school SIS (like PowerSchool) and synchronizes it with Azure Active Directory and Office 365 so that Classroom (or any other application) can use the roster data to create online classrooms, have context about the student, and even enable single sign-on.

Conclusion

These two third generation LMS players are quite evenly matched, offering school districts who are looking for an alternative to Google Classroom that relies on robust, familiar MS Office tools a rich alternative. Given the speed with which Microsoft is working to add new features, both should reach parity soon. However, OneNote Class Notebook, OneNote Learning Tools, Collaboration Space, and the ability to quickly disseminate handouts and resources to students via the Content Library give Microsoft Classroom the edge. What’s more, OneNote serves as a great ePortfolio solution that can integrate with a variety of learning management systems, including Google Classroom. Depending on your needs, there is no reason why your district or school couldn’t mix and match the various tools (e.g. Google Classroom + OneNote Class Notebook, MS Classroom with YouTube) to get the desired results.

Interested in Creative Coding through Games and Apps (CCGA)? Even if you are a “non-programmer,” or have experienced failure in the past with coding, consider attending the CCGA professional learning opportunity being held on December 2, 2016 at TCEA in Austin, Texas. The session is available for free and will give you the opportunity to explore the TouchDevelop, a coding environment built for mobile that works on any device (including Chromebooks, iPads, Android)!

Every other week, I read or hear about a school district that has suffered a phishing attack, an approach distributed by email designed to trick you into giving your email username and password to criminals. Dealing with ransomware (a form of software that infects your machine when you double-click on it and encrypts your files, then demands you pay them for decrypting them) can be embarrassing, since it may result in the district having to pay to get its data. Or lose the data and tell only the federal auditors coming to evaluate your records for the last five years. Oops!

In addition, ransomware may alsobe distributed to district users via email. Several districts and Texas education service centers have allegedly faced some of these challenges (allegedly because ransomware infestations travel through word of mouth):

It’s…thrown a kink in the school district’s scheduled…exams…The crypto-ransomware “has affected the district’s entire operations from internal and external communications to its point-of-sale for school lunches. It also has prevented any students from taking the scheduled…exams, which are entirely computerized.” Source:Network World

Follow these tips to safeguard your hard work in computer documents and files on your computer:

Look before you click! Avoid clicking on email attachments that come from people you do not know. Email attachments with “exe” and “zip” are suspicious. Also, do NOT go into your SPAM folder and click on the email attachments.

Connect before opening. Ask yourself, “Was I expecting a file from this person?” If yes, connect with them via phone, social media, or email and ask, “Did you send me this file?” If the answer is “no,” then delete it.

Avoid clicking on email attachments via your personal email on a work computer, especially if it’s a Yahoo email account. Multiple types of malware spread ads via that one service alone.

Scan files before opening them. You can right-click a file, save it to your computer, and then choose to virus scan it before opening it.

Backup your data to a cloud drive storage provider (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox). Ransomware can spread via cloud storage where your files are automatically backed up when you place them in a certain folder (e.g. Dropbox), so be aware that ransomware WILL encrypt those files and the encrypted files will be backed up. Back up manually to the cloud and/or to external USB drives. Avoid leaving the latter connected to your computer.

Staff that succumb to phishing attacks open the organization’s virtual doors to a ransomware infestation. For example, in my inbox, I received an email purporting to be from a colleague sharing some files with me via Dropbox, but this looked like a phishing attack. Let’s go through the process I went through together.

Knowing that my colleague did not send this email, I opened up a fresh browser where I’m not logged into anything and tried the link: It didn’t work. That’s good! But if it had been a phishing scam, something like this would have popped up: When you examine the “Click here to view” link, you will find as I did that the link is to a non-Dropbox web site in the UK. That suggested to me that this link did NOT originate with Dropbox. As a result, I contacted my colleague via Twitter and asked, “Did you send me something via email that originated on Dropbox?” He responded after a short delay, “No, I didn’t.”

Notice how the screen to the left offers you the opportunity to compromise your login and password for multiple email providers. This suggests that the goal is to steal ANY email account credentials you have. This can be potentially catastrophic since school district personnel often save student/staff confidential content in the cloud.

Actual Example: One principal was shocked when her Google Apps for Education account started sending out phishing attacks to all the email lists she was a member of, including the district-wide principals’ list, her campus staff list, and district-wide news list. And her shock turned into horror as colleagues clicked and were infected themselves. Horror shifted to shame as her colleagues grew angry, inquiring why she had inflicted them with this plague of phishing. And all the principal had done was fall prey to a phishing attack from a dear friend.

Fortunately, this can be avoided with the five tips above. Raise expectations for staff to take responsibility for their email communications, and their technologies.

Bonus Tips for Home Users

While many of us have district-purchased software to protect us at work (although even that will not help you if you deliberately ignore the warnings), our home computers may not be so protected. Below are a few software tools that I use on my Windows and/or Mac computer(s) to protect against infestation. Note that this does not constitute a purchase recommendation since these tools are available for free, personal home use:

I have all of the following on my personal Windows computer and wouldn’t dream of using it without having them installed. In spite of the fact that Windows Defender comes standard on Windows 10 computers, it’s important to have anti-malware and antivirus software loaded and working.

“The Superintendent just called. The marquee in front of the football stadium hasn’t been connected yet.” I stared at the phone in my hand in disbelief.

When my team got together, I reviewed the facts of the situation with them. “There’s a big game tonight and the Superintendent really wants to see that marquee operational. When we spoke earlier, I had the impression the job had been finished last week.”

“Apparently,” quipped one technician, “it’s not.”

“Thanks a lot, Captain Obvious,” muttered the network engineer responsible for the job.

Dialogue-rich scenarios like this one, whether in text, image, or video format, are often sufficient to engage adults or K-12 learners in solving a problem. For adults, the focus may be on generating problem-solving strategies, while for students, the goal may be to achieve an instructional objective.

KSAT 12, a San Antonio news station, has contacted the school and asked us to investigate exploding hoverboards. What they are asking is, simply speaking, “How do hoverboards work and are they are safe?”

The length of the scenario determines the scope of the curriculum and goals to be addressed. In the scenario above for hoverboards, the relevant TEKS include:

4.6(A) Differentiate among forms of energy, including mechanical, sound, electrical, light, and heat/thermal.

4.6(B) Differentiate between conductors and insulators.

4.6(C) Demonstrate that electricity travels in a closed path, creating an electrical circuit, and explore an electromagnetic field.

4.6(D) Design an experiment to test the effect of force on an object such as a push or a pull, gravity, friction, or magnetism.

Problem-based learning (PBL), often labelled project-based learning, relies on real-life problems modeled after a contemporary or historical case to engage students as they pursue specified learning outcomes that are in line with academic standards or course objectives (Stepien & Pyke, 1997). Learners work through the problem as a stakeholder.

The teacher, or professional learning leader, acts as a guide/advisor as students explore the issues involved, formulate questions, conduct research, and consider possible solutions to the problems. An critical component for PBL planners is to reflect on questions like the following:

What did we really want them to learn?

Why was it important that they learn this?

What problems or issues would they be able to resolve with the information?

What process, if any, do we want them to follow? Was that process governed by policy? Which ones in particular?

These questions help us to first map out what we want students to learn and thus craft a problem that reflects that and aligns to learning objectives. Keep these questions in mind when crafting your next PBL unit.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Getting started with 3D printing or thinking about it? There are tons of resources online, as well as Diigo groups where resources are shared frequently. Check out the TCEA resources available here and here. And then read below to find answers to the most common 3D printing questions.

#2 – How does 3D printing work? How do I get started?

Once you have your 3D printer, you will need to use special software to create print files that tell the printer how to proceed and make things. There are many tools available, among them TinkerCAD, which is a web-based software package that is easy for young learners to start with.

Tinkercad is an amazingly powerful easy-to-use tool for creating digital designs that are ready to be 3D printed into super-cool physical objects. You will be guided through the 3D design process via easy hands-on “Lessons” that teach you the basics of Tinkercad before moving on to more complex modeling techniques. Read more.

Once you have created an object, you can print it. For classroom purposes, limit your students to objects that will print in less than four hours (think small!).

#3 – What are some helpful vocabulary terms one encounters when using 3D printers?

There are various terms that you do not necessarily need to know. Refer to the glossary at the end of this blog for a general list of terms. Some of the key ones to know include “build plate,” “filament,” “extrusion or print nozzle,” and “extruder arm.” It is also important to know that there are several types of filament, which resembles weedeater cord.

#4 – What can I realistically print?

You can print anything you have a design for, realizing that for more complex designs, you will have to print each component of a design separately and then assemble it.

You have several choices:

Design something yourself using 3D printer software (e.g. TinkerCAD or SketchUp Pro). You can also use a free app like 123D Catch (iOS) to capture an object using your mobile device, and then digitize it for printing.

Download a file from the web that’s already designed so that you can modify and print it (e.g. Thingverse, CookieCaster).

Collaborate with others to co-design a 3D project, such as to help design a prosthetic device.

#5 – What are some of the costs of 3D printing?

If you are hoping to get an idea for the cost of a 3D printer, you may want to look at some of the ones listed on Amazon. Here are a few popular printers:

There are less expensive 3D printers you can get for your home, of course. Also, consider these additional items:

Filament (approx. $25): The cost of a spool of filament, the source material for the 3D print.

Build Tape ($25): This is what goes on the non-heated glass surface of your 3D printer to facilitate removal of printed items. You can usually skip this if you have a heated glass surface (a.k.a. build plate or print bed).

For post-processing a printed item, you may also want to have on hand the following:

References

Glossary of 3D Printing Terms

Build plate (a.k.a. print bed) – This is the glass your 3D-printed creation will be built on.

Dremel Build Tape – This is the tape used to cover the glass (the “bed” or “build plate”) upon which the 3D-printed object will rest. Non-heated print beds normally need to be covered in blue tape (painter’s tape) or even Kapton tape (i.e. polyimide tape – very heat resistant) in order to make the print stick to the print bed. The tape helps with initial adhesion of the thermoplastic and keeps everything in place during the print. The object needs to be firmly fixed to the print bed, as the slightest movement of the printed object itself will most probably result in a botched-up print. As the adhesion factor of the blue tape wears out quickly, it needs to be replaced regularly.

Dremel Multi-Tool ($20) – This facilitates removal of the 3D printed item from the print bed.

Extrusion or print nozzle – This refers to the nozzle from which the filament emerges. Also known as the “hot end.”

Extruder – The extruder is actually the part that is responsible for feeding the filament into the so-called “hot-end.” See diagram shown right. (Source)

Extruder arm – This is the arm to which the extrusion nozzle–where the filament is distributed from onto the build plate–is attached. The arm moves in the prearranged design, laid out in layers.

FDM – Fused Deposition Model refers to the type of 3D printer. FDM printers use a thermoplastic filament, which is heated to its melting point and then extruded, layer by layer, to create a three-dimensional object. “Objects created with an FDM printer start out as computer-aided design (CAD) files. Before an object can be printed, its CAD file must be converted to a format that a 3D printer can understand — usually .STL format”. (Source)

FFF – Fused Filament Fabrication is another way of referring to an FDM 3D printer, except the term isn’t copyrighted or trademarked. “FFF printers are by far the most common 3D printer type used for home 3D printing, i.e. desktop 3D printers. If you are thinking of buying your own 3D printer, a FFF is most likely the technology that you will end up using. Fused Filament Fabrication is nothing but a fancy word to describe a process by which a machine deposits a filament (picture something like a small string) of a certain material (normally thermoplastics, wax, or similar products) on top or next to the same material in order to create a joint by heat and/or adhesion. Thermoplastics are plastics which become semi-liquid above a specific temperature and return to a solid state when cooling down.” (Source for quotes above about FFF and diagram shown right)

Filament: There are several types of filament, including the following:

PLA – This is “pretty” filament, food safe and plastic.

ABS – This is strong and is what is usually used for logos. It has toxins, so it’s not safe for food storage items (e.g. mugs).

PLA/PHA – Strong and pretty looking.

Co-Polyster – ninjaflex, rubbery

Composite PLA – Shavings of organic material such as copper, limestone, poplar wood, cedar, plastic. You can use this to make small objects that appear to be made of metal.

Filament + Perfume – These are used to get rid of the “burnt” smell and have a nice odor. Good for schools where the 3D printer is in a common area.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

As the end of the school year came into sight, colleague Laura Howard in San Angelo ISD wrote me a short request for help. With her permission, allow me to share it with you:

“A few years back at TCEA,” asks Laura Howard in an email, “you had a session on curation and sharing information. You talked about how to weed through information, save it for later, and use tools like IFTTT to set up rules on your social media feeds, etc. Would it be possible for me to get the information you shared at that session?”“Absolutely!” I replied. “Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to revisit such a popular topic!”

Let’s divide this up into several bite-sized chunks.

What Is Content Curation?

Content curation is a way of managing the firehose of data slamming into us from every device we own, from computer to smartphone. But it is more than just sorting and saving the information flow. It is also about re-sharing it with others, thus making you a trusted source of re-mixed information and ideas. Content curation involves a commitment that you agree to make sense of the world around you for the purpose of sharing it with other educators and especially with your students.

Want to Manage the Flow of Information?

Managing the flow of information can be difficult. That is why you have to identify the following three areas:

Source(s) of Information: You have to know where you usually get information and ideas from.

Tracking Tool: Once you know where you get your information, you need to decide where you want that information to be stored long-term for easy retrieval. This tracking and retrieval tool should be easy to organize using tags (one-word keywords) and make it simple to share information with others.

Sharing Outlet: When you have sifted through the data you want to keep and stored it for retrieval, you will want to decide where and with whom to share it.

Let’s explore these three areas in the context of a real life scenario.

Scenario – Anchor Charts

Loretta just found out she will be facilitating a workshop for her grade level on anchor charts. A quick Google search reveals that there are many places to find example anchor charts, as well as instructions on how to create them, what they should have in them, how they should be created with students, and much more. She also discovered a Twitter chat that is taking place later on the topic, but she will be on the go with only her mobile phone during that time. She wants to capture select tweets. She needs a way to organize the information so it makes sense to her later, as well as makes sense to the teachers she will be working with.

To help Loretta, let’s break down the problem:

Sources of Information: Loretta has identified several sources of information:

Web Searches: Resources are discovered on the web and via her mobile device.

Twitter Chat: She needs to capture Twitter chats.

Tracking Tool:

Twitter Chat: Loretta doesn’t want to capture EVERY contribution to a Twitter chat, only the ones she happens to notice. She decides to “like” or “heart” every tweet worth keeping. Then, IFTTT will save those select tweets to her OneNote Notebook, which she can later organize. Also, she decides to use TweetDeck as a way to monitor multiple twitter chats on her computer because it allows for multiple columns of information. With TweetDeck, she can also schedule tweets to appear. Another option is HootSuite, which works great on mobile devices, a feature TweetDeck does not enjoy.

Web Searches:

Option A – Pocket: Although Loretta has several choices, she decides to use Read It Later’s Pocket because it’s easy to add content via a computer web browser and/or the mobile app. Everything she tags with “anchorcharts” gets sent to herOneNote Notebook (free app) and auto-tweeted with the hashtag #anchorcharts. The auto-tweet and saving to OneNote happens through an IFTTT recipe she set up once when she began.

Option B – Diigo: Another solid choice includes Diigo Social Bookmarking tool, which includes Diigo Browser and Diigo Annotator for your mobile device. Diigo is nice because it includes an outlining tool which Loretta could use to organize her links and resources.

Sharing Outlet: Once she has sifted through her data and stored it for retrieval, Loretta must decide where and with whom to share it.

IFTTT can be used to easily take any tweets that Loretta has liked and tweet them out from her account with the “#anchorcharts” hashtag added to the end. Another option is to use that hashtag to search on and create a Flipboard digital magazine.

OneNote: Loretta has accumulated quite a bit of content in OneNote. She decides to just go in and organize it a bit, adding a welcome page and organizing the resources into sections.

Scenario Solution

Loretta showed up to present to teachers. “How many of you have Twitter accounts?” Only half of the teachers raised their hands. “No problem,” she said. “Just go to my AnchorChart OneNote Notebook(the link is on the screen) and you will find what I’ll be sharing with you. I’ve put my slidedeck underneath the welcome page. We’ll be exploring the anchor chart links and key concepts I learned about this summer in the next 50 minutes.”

“For those of you that have Twitter accounts, if you know about some great anchor chart resources, please tweet them and add the hashtag #anchorcharts. Those items will get added to the OneNote Notebook we are looking at today.”

Wrap Up

As you might imagine, getting Pocket, IFTTT, and OneNote set up for the first time can be a bit of a handful. Once set up though, the hunting, gathering, and sharing system works with minimal interaction. And this system works just as well for grade 5-16 learners for whom a teacher could be curating content, as well as for administrators curating content for staff.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Krista Welz (@kristawelz) has shared an incredible use of Google Slides to create what she calls, “animated book displays.” This allows you to feature your school library’s new books or a specific genre collection.

She has even created a template to go with it. Krista describes it in this way:

Feature your school library’s brand new books or a specific genre collection with this animated book covers display. The display is made on Google Slides – yes, Google Slides. It is a slideshow with preset animations on each book cover.

She offers this template for download; when you click it, you will be given the option to make a copy of it into your own Google Drive (you will want to be signed into your Google account).

Create a list of the books you want to display on your animated book covers slideshow. You can type them in a list on Google Docs or use any list-maker method you prefer.

Create a folder on your desktop titled “book covers.”

Go to www.goodreads.com and search for a book on your list. Right-click on the book cover image and save it to your desktop folder labeled “book covers.” Repeat this step for every book cover you need to save. Once you have saved all the book covers to your folder, you will start inserting them into the slideshow.

The animating book covers slideshow is set up with two rows and five columns. You are going to start inserting your book cover photos and arranging them in two rows and five columns. All book covers have to be resized to the same height and location. They need to be consistent and match each other. Once the books are perfectly resized and aligned correctly, you will add the animations to them.

Now you are going to animate each book cover in a zigzag pattern.

If you click on the first book cover labeled #1, you are going to add an animation to it by clicking on the Insert menu and choosing Animate. The Animation window pane will pop up on the right of the screen.

The animation you want to choose is “Fade In – After Previous.”

Next, choose the book labeled #2, click on Insert, choose Animation, and then set it to “Fade In – After Previous.” You are going to do this for all 10 books.

There is only one change to the animation that you are going to make. The change occurs on your sixth book. Instead of choosing the animation “After Previous” – you will choose “With Previous.” This change in animation reduces the choppiness, giving it a smoother flow.

Please take note of the animations listed on the right-side of the Google Slides slideshow. You must follow this exactly as it is shown to have a beautiful, flowing animated book display.

Some other points that Krista makes:

Once you access the slideshow, all you have to do is right-click on each book image on each slide and then choose Replace image.

You will then select Choose an image and then upload the book cover(s) from your desktop folder of saved book covers. All the animations and slide transitions are already timed for your convenience.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Amazingly, someone (names changed to protect the innocent) wrote me yesterday with this request about flipped learning:

This is Rachel from Jeremiah Middle School in a large urban school district in San Antonio, an admirer of your mad tech skills. Here’s the scoop: I am in need of a quick and fast mini-lesson on the topic of “flipped lessons.” The teachers are now being asked to compose several flipped lessons for the upcoming year. If you can tell me what information I may be able to instruct the staff on, it would be greatly appreciated.

What Is Flipped Learning?

If you are not familiar with flipped learning (#flippedlearning Twitter chat is nice to get caught up), here is how I describe it to others:

In a typical flipped classroom, students listen to pre-recorded video lectures beforeclass and perform other learning activities in class. In this flipped structure, students are exposed to material before class via videos and readings, and they attain deeper knowledge in class via activities. Why would you want to go to the trouble of doing flipped learning? Because the research says it works. I like to point folks to 10 Published Findings and Studies that offer qualitative and quantitative results in support of flipped learning, as well as Sophia Learning’s Flipped Classroom online course (free!). And keep in mind that flipped learning can work with students of any age.

Overcoming Technical Obstacles

Unfortunately, many teachers who are uncomfortable with technology to begin with get hung up on the technical aspects of flipping the classroom. Here are some practical suggestions for helping them in professional learning:

1) Show teachers how to storyboard their content first, then create a video about their lesson with the tools they have on hand. All the tools are free to get started. (A few of my favorites appear below.)

2) Keep videos short, 5 to 10 minutes max (shorter is better). You can always create more videos. Think “bite-sized chunks” that students can nibble on their way to/from school, sitting somewhere waiting for an adult to do something, or during the gap in a basketball game on television or in person.

3) Figure out where the videos will be posted. This is THE MOST IMPORTANT question to get answered before you start encouraging teachers to start sharing flipped video lessons. If you’re using Google Apps for Education, you have unlimited storage. If you are using Microsoft OneDrive for Business/Schools (Office 365 through your district), then you have one terabyte of storage space. If you are using YouTube, no problem. Video hosting is VERY important because it has to be accessible by both staff and students.

4) Plan for intensive classroom activities, and don’t be surprised if part of your class needs to watch the video in class (set up a pod of computers or devices where that can happen) while the rest of the students wrestle with a real life application of the flipped learning.

Arden Curtis

Listen to Practitioners

In a hallway at the annual TCEA Convention & Exposition, you can learn a lot if you stop to chat with folks. One person that I met during the TCEA 2014 convention was Arden Curtis (@ardencurtis), a ninth grade biology teacher at the time. This was an off-the-cuff conversation that yielded quite a few insights into flipped learning. Be sure to listen to practitioners like Arden.

Flipped Learning Tools

Looking for some quick tools to get started?

Microsoft Snip: If you are on a Windows computer, then give some serious consideration to Microsoft Snip, which allows you to snap a picture of your screen (e.g. a technical diagram, student work that needs feedback, whatever) and then record audio as you annotate it. To get an idea of how this works, play the short Snip I recorded .

“When I started to design technology training for our district, I knew that to reach all the members of our school community, I would have to offer multiple delivery methods. Screencasting was a perfect solution for that as it affords teachers and students the chance to learn at their own pace.” – Dr. Roland Rios (@drrios), Fort Sam Houston ISD. If you’re exploring flipped learning, the word “screencasting” is one you will hear often. As Dr. Rios points out, screencasting affords teachers and students the opportunity to learn at their own pace. Here are some commonly used screencasting tools:

Chromebook and/or Chrome-friendly tools that work for any computer that can run the Chrome browser, including Chromebook, Windows, and Mac:

Touchcast. This free app makes green screen, flipped learning, video newsletters so easy. While it may be initially complex because of all the options, I have no doubt a short session and time spent watching others use it will get you ready to create flipped learning for your students. It is well worth learning all the bells and whistles in this app. Ample tutorials are available.

Educreations. This free app has long been on the preferred list for teachers and students. Not only is it easy (view tutorial), but it solves the problem that many educators don’t want to deal with in their particular district: where to host the video created. Educreations will host content, of course, offering additional features at a price.

Finally, since flipped learning involves working with video files, I must share some tips on the technical process of dealing with it:

Choose a screencasting tool that allows you to export directly to MP4 video format. This is the most commonly used video format and works with all devices. Anything else will just result in headaches. MS Snip, TechSmith’s SnagIt/Camtasia, ExplainEverything, and Touchcast allow you to do this without much fuss.

The new HTML5 friendly video format is also known as WebM and you may need to convert from that format to MP4 to easily share the file with others. Nimbus Screencast and Screencastify are both Chromebook apps that will save to WebM. You may need to rely on a web-based video converter to get these videos to MP4 format, depending on where you host them. YouTube, though, will accept WebM format.

Decide ahead of time where you will publish your video. The best solutions include Google Apps for Education (GAFE) Drive since you have unlimited space, OneDrive for Business (Office 365), or YouTube. You can also set up your own video hosting solution or take advantage of one like Vimeo.

But, wait, there’s more! Once you have your video recorded and ready for students to access online, you may want some way to determine if they have watched it. Mix in a Google Sheet Reflection with a Flubaroo feedback form that triggers when they submit something, an Excel Online Survey form that allows them to submit their reflections, or have them create something online, anywhere.

Virtual spaces like Google Classrooms, Microsoft Classroom, Edmodo, Diigo Outliner (free for educators), and Sophia Learning all offer ways to help structure flipped learning content. You can also combine tools like OneNote with Microsoft Sway embedded in OneNote pages to create a virtual “closed space” or an open one, depending on what the culture of your teaching and learning environment.

Whether it’s a piece of writing, a Vocaroo audio file they can send you the link to or a video reflection they can post on YouTube, flipped learning reflections can empower students to become consumers and creators of academic content.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“He’s not a programmer!” cried my Mom when my father bought me a $3,000 Apple //e computer, dot matrix printer, and software (e.g. VisiCalc, The Print Shop) at age 13. “He’s terrible in math.” Would you say the same about drones and 3D printers that involve programming?

Computers, obviously, were for programming. Her words stuck with me through the years, and true enough, coding and math remain anathema to me. Having served as a technology director for many years, I can honestly say my Dad made a good investment and he passed the “vision” test.

Note: This blog entry originally published by TCEA TechNotes blog. Check it out and read all the great stuff they have online!

Can the same be said of educators in schools who say NO to drones and 3D printers because they involve GUI (a.k.a. object-oriented) programming? Consider that technology gets easier to use and less expensive over time. Look no further than the OLO 3D Smartphone Printer for yet another marvel that may soon be in your home or classroom.

Will you pass the test when it comes to envisioning ways your students can use 3D printing technology for learning or will a too-narrow vision constrain their possibilities? Introduce your children to 3D printing with some no-cost apps on your mobile device.

123D Design (Mac/PC/iOS): Design and edit 3D creations with this program or app.

3DMaker Case (iOS): Enables you to design and create a customized case for your mobile phone. Having paid for multiple cases for my son’s phone, enabling students to design their own would provide a great learning experience!

Getting started with 3D printing or thinking about it? There are tons of resources online, as well as Diigo groups where resources are shared frequently. Check out the TCEA resources available here and here. And then read below to find answers to the most common 3D printing questions.

Note: This blog entry was first published at TCEA TechNotes, an award winning blog. Read more great stuff over there!

#2 – How does 3D printing work? How do I get started?

Once you have your 3D printer, you will need to use special software to create print files that tell the printer how to proceed and make things. There are many tools available, among them TinkerCAD, which is a web-based software package that is easy for young learners to start with.

Tinkercad is an amazingly powerful easy-to-use tool for creating digital designs that are ready to be 3D printed into super-cool physical objects. You will be guided through the 3D design process via easy hands-on “Lessons” that teach you the basics of Tinkercad before moving on to more complex modeling techniques. Read more.

Once you have created an object, you can print it. For classroom purposes, limit your students to objects that will print in less than four hours (think small!).

#3 – What are some helpful vocabulary terms one encounters when using 3D printers?

There are various terms that you do not necessarily need to know. Refer to the glossary at the end of this blog for a general list of terms. Some of the key ones to know include “build plate,” “filament,” “extrusion or print nozzle,” and “extruder arm.” It is also important to know that there are several types of filament, which resembles weedeater cord.

#4 – What can I realistically print?

You can print anything you have a design for, realizing that for more complex designs, you will have to print each component of a design separately and then assemble it.

You have several choices:

Design something yourself using 3D printer software (e.g. TinkerCAD or SketchUp Pro). You can also use a free app like 123D Catch (iOS) to capture an object using your mobile device, and then digitize it for printing.

Download a file from the web that’s already designed so that you can modify and print it (e.g. Thingverse, CookieCaster).

Collaborate with others to co-design a 3D project, such as to help design a prosthetic device.

#5 – What are some of the costs of 3D printing?

If you are hoping to get an idea for the cost of a 3D printer, you may want to look at some of the ones listed on Amazon. Here are a few popular printers:

There are less expensive 3D printers you can get for your home, of course. Also, consider these additional items:

Filament (approx. $25): The cost of a spool of filament, the source material for the 3D print.

Build Tape ($25): This is what goes on the non-heated glass surface of your 3D printer to facilitate removal of printed items. You can usually skip this if you have a heated glass surface (a.k.a. build plate or print bed).

For post-processing a printed item, you may also want to have on hand the following:

References

Glossary of 3D Printing Terms

Build plate (a.k.a. print bed) – This is the glass your 3D-printed creation will be built on.

Dremel Build Tape – This is the tape used to cover the glass (the “bed” or “build plate”) upon which the 3D-printed object will rest. Non-heated print beds normally need to be covered in blue tape (painter’s tape) or even Kapton tape (i.e. polyimide tape – very heat resistant) in order to make the print stick to the print bed. The tape helps with initial adhesion of the thermoplastic and keeps everything in place during the print. The object needs to be firmly fixed to the print bed, as the slightest movement of the printed object itself will most probably result in a botched-up print. As the adhesion factor of the blue tape wears out quickly, it needs to be replaced regularly.

Dremel Multi-Tool ($20) – This facilitates removal of the 3D printed item from the print bed.

Extrusion or print nozzle – This refers to the nozzle from which the filament emerges. Also known as the “hot end.”

Extruder – The extruder is actually the part that is responsible for feeding the filament into the so-called “hot-end.” See diagram shown right. (Source)

Extruder arm – This is the arm to which the extrusion nozzle–where the filament is distributed from onto the build plate–is attached. The arm moves in the prearranged design, laid out in layers.

FDM – Fused Deposition Model refers to the type of 3D printer. FDM printers use a thermoplastic filament, which is heated to its melting point and then extruded, layer by layer, to create a three-dimensional object. “Objects created with an FDM printer start out as computer-aided design (CAD) files. Before an object can be printed, its CAD file must be converted to a format that a 3D printer can understand — usually .STL format”. (Source)

FFF – Fused Filament Fabrication is another way of referring to an FDM 3D printer, except the term isn’t copyrighted or trademarked. “FFF printers are by far the most common 3D printer type used for home 3D printing, i.e. desktop 3D printers. If you are thinking of buying your own 3D printer, a FFF is most likely the technology that you will end up using. Fused Filament Fabrication is nothing but a fancy word to describe a process by which a machine deposits a filament (picture something like a small string) of a certain material (normally thermoplastics, wax, or similar products) on top or next to the same material in order to create a joint by heat and/or adhesion. Thermoplastics are plastics which become semi-liquid above a specific temperature and return to a solid state when cooling down.” (Source for quotes above about FFF and diagram shown right)

Filament: There are several types of filament, including the following:

PLA – This is “pretty” filament, food safe and plastic.

ABS – This is strong and is what is usually used for logos. It has toxins, so it’s not safe for food storage items (e.g. mugs).

PLA/PHA – Strong and pretty looking.

Co-Polyster – ninjaflex, rubbery

Composite PLA – Shavings of organic material such as copper, limestone, poplar wood, cedar, plastic. You can use this to make small objects that appear to be made of metal.

Filament + Perfume – These are used to get rid of the “burnt” smell and have a nice odor. Good for schools where the 3D printer is in a common area.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Note: This blog entry was originally published in 3 parts at TCEA TechNotes blog at http://www.tcea.org/blog. I’ve combined all into one blog entry here. The term “wicked problem” was introduced to me by previous work colleague…it is defined as a problem that endures in spite of effort brought to bear to solve it. Having solved my share of wicked problems in the technology field, I thought I’d share how I got it done.

“Our kiddoes are stuck in a portable building with no internet,” challenged a kindly, experienced principal, smiling her demand, “and I’m not sure why. Can you help me, please?” In any environment, there are various ways of accomplishing goals and objectives and of receiving funding for needed projects.

In some locations, a conversation that moves participants towards action suffices, while in others, the value is placed on a formal presentation or proposal. In the next few blog entries, I explore several ways that most supervisors will ask for plans of action. Having successfully introduced and implemented several types of technology projects, I hope that these suggestions will save you some time.

Approach #1 – Conversations that Result in Action (and Funding)

“The network conduit pipe needs to be installed to a ‘pull box,’ capped when not being used, with a pull string, and the pipe needs to be buried, not laid in an open trench.” I had just come from seeing the work a small district maintenance team had done and snapped a few pictures. The response was to the question “Why can’t the district maintenance department do the job at less cost?” Of course, they had stated they knew how to do the job of putting a network conduit pipe in place, but had done so poorly, a fact evidenced by several photographs. Obviously, not doing these things resulted in several problems. When it rained, the network conduit pipe was filled with water, and the networking contractor could not run the cable without a pull string. This resulted in a delay of several months to the project during the school year. The goal was to outsource the job to networking professionals who knew the proper way to install a conduit pipe. But how to get district leadership to understand the necessary cost, and that saving money really was just wasting time?

When working with others who approve budgets for a project, it is absolutely critical to introduce expensive ideas in informal conversations that focus on the need of the organization. Your responsibility, as the person proposing the information, is to clearly articulate the need(s) of the organization. It’s not YOU that wants to spend money, Rather, you are compelled by the need you have encountered. Make sure to have these conversations with all stakeholders prior to having a formal meeting. These kinds of conversations will carry the day for the needs you have expressed and the people you serve. When possible, obtain pictures or photos. Following this approach enables leadership to not be overwhelmed with technical information and to clearly see the problem.

It’s clear that while talk is cheap, conversations can result in much-needed action.

A Problem for You to SolveLet’s explore an additional scenario which features a wicked problem, a problem that has endured for years, and see how you would handle it. Leave your approaches in the comments.

“When the power poles in the computer labs were put in, the maintenance department failed to connect the power.”

“Wait,” the technology director asked surprised, “Are you saying that all these power poles do not have power in them? Are you just daisy chaining the power from one outlet?”

“Yes,” replied the media specialist. “That is exactly what we have had to do. As you can guess, we can’t put as many computers in this room as we would like. And I’m worried about overloading power. Isn’t this unsafe or something? I’ve told my principal, but she doesn’t have the money to get it done and it should have been done when they built the school several years ago.”

In the next blog entry, we will explore another approach to getting projects funded out of existing budgets: the Executive Summary.

In the previous blog entry in this series, I shared that solving wicked problems involves different approaches, each of which will be received differently by your supervisor or those with the power to pay for an expensive project. This is part 2 in the series.

Speak to an administrator at the cabinet level, and they all have one expectation: “Keep it to one page.” A one-page document can make all the difference, and I can honestly say that I have had hundreds of thousands of dollars funded through a well-written executive summary submitted to superintendent level staff.

Scenario #1 – Insufficient Power

“When the power poles in the computer labs were put in, the maintenance department failed to connect the power.”

“Wait!” the technology director asked surprised. “Are you saying that all these power poles do not have power in them? Are you just daisy chaining the power from one outlet?”

“Yes,” replied the media specialist. “That is exactly what we have had to do. As you can guess, we can’t put as many computers in this room as we would like. And I’m worried about overloading power. Isn’t that unsafe or something? I’ve told my principal, but she doesn’t have the money to get it done and it should have been done when they built the school several years ago.”

In this scenario, there are several issues, right? The first is that the maintenance department failed to connect the power. The second is that no one followed up for years to address the issue when it was fresh. Add to that the fact that the temporary/permanent solution may be unsafe or result in greater damage to the campus’ infrastructure. The fourth and most important consequence is that the lab cannot be used at full capacity, preventing students from taking advantage of the computers that are there. In fact, some of those computers have been moved out of the lab because there is insufficient power. Something needs to happen. The answer to this scenario involves an executive summary focused on getting things done.

Note the brevity, as well as the key elements, of the Executive Summary below:

Executive Summary for Ardent ISD High School Campus Electrical Needs

Overview

The Ardent ISD High School campus currently has several computer labs. However, each lacks critical electrical connections. The lack of electrical connections prevent full utilization of the computer labs, impacting their use for high stakes assessments:

Room #

Description

Network Drops Needed and 48-Port Switch

Electrical

321

Standalone Lab (30)

Window 10 OS

4 drops

Has electrical poles installed, but no electrical outlets. Electrical outlets are in the floor, which presents problems for consistent use.

221

Standalone Lab (30)

Window 10 OS

5 drops

Same electrical challenges as Room 321

Staff Impact

Staff who employ the computer labs adjoining library.

Student Impact

All students at the campus would be affected.

Budget Available

Campus has not identified funding for infrastructure needs.

Professional Learning

Not applicable

Products

Improved network support and responsiveness, upgraded lab.

Stakeholders

Campus; Maintenance Department; Technology Department

Why is this necessary?

High School campus labs lack electrical connections needed to “complete” the labs. Inadequately wired rooms have consequences on performance of equipment and reliability.

What happens if we don’t implement?

High school campus labs will continue to face electrical issues caused by poles that were never wired for electrical. Furthermore, new equipment will sit unused in the labs.

Potential summary of costs are as follows (estimated since quotes are not yet available):

Electrical in Labs: $1,000 (estimate)

How will we measure success?

All labs will be at 100% utilization and have functional network and electrical connections.

When will this happen?

This is scheduled for the 2016-2017 budget year.

In the next blog entry, we will explore another approach to getting projects funded out of existing budgets: the Standard Proposal.

When details matter, and there are many stakeholders who will need to review a project prior to implementation, you will want to take advantage of the standard proposal format. The brief version of the proposal format includes certain elements of the longer form:

Proposal

Research

Cost

Registration Process, and

Give Back.

ProposalThis proposal recommends that Ardent ISD fund attendance at the TCEA 2017 Convention & Exposition taking place February 2017 in Austin, Texas for 200 principals and/or ESSA instructional specialists. Administrators play a pivotal role in determining how well technology is used in our schools. Enabling administrators to attend the conference enables Ardent ISD to define what administrators need to know and be able to do in order to discharge their responsibility as leaders in the effective use of technology in our schools.

[inspirational quote that summarizes the importance of professional learning for campus instructional leaders]

ResearchSchool leaders, especially at the campus level, need access to professional learning opportunities that help them to better understand the best uses of technology in educational settings. Some research regarding the role of the campus principal and leadership…[include bulleted list of research points]. Based on this research, as well as others not cited here, it is clear that the role of the principal in affecting use of technology in classrooms is incredibly important.

CostThe cost of sending approximately 200 staff is based on a cost of $285 for every 10 staff members. For 200 participants, the cost is $22,800.

Registration ProcessTo register campus leaders for the TCEA 2017 Convention & Exposition, the Office of Instructional Technology Services will take the following steps…

Give BackParticipants at the convention will be expected to facilitate presentations at the Ardent ISD Tech Unconference to be held in June 2017.

For the longer proposal format, the headings appear below. As you might imagine, it can be quite tedious to fill out and plan all the implementation details. That aside, I have never had a “long form” proposal declined because it is overwhelmingly powerful. I often think of this as the dreadnought battleship approach to getting things done.

Goal

Vision of What Successful Implementation Looks Like

Background Information

Content Area Focus

Professional Learning

Implementation Phases

Key Areas to Implementation Success

Implementation Timeline (which includes a table with action step, office/staff responsible, and a completion date)

Appendix (with information such as):

Readiness Checklist

Hardware/Network Assessment

Solving wicked problems can seem impossible. But often, it requires the strategic application of one or more approaches outlined in the “Solving Wicked Problems” series. Make the effort and you will see the results.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“How do you blend tools to solve a real-life problem?” That’s a question that pops up often for me. A popular concept from using iPads is “app-smashing,” which involves taking what you made in one app and dropping it into another. Usually,this results in a refinement of the initial product, enhancing it with audio or video, so that the overall product is improved. You can do the same with Google Apps tools.

Let’s consider these real-world scenarios which may all be solved by combining key Google tools such as Sites, Forms, and Sheets:

Classroom Scenario:

Students have asked how they can know who else has signed up to attend an after-hours, academic field trip. To automate the process, you realize you can create a Google Form to capture student registrations, which are saved to a Google Sheet, and those responses can be displayed on a Google Sites location.

District Scenario:

Staff have a variety of questions regarding a new initiative. They want to make sure you, the administrator, are getting the responses. To eliminate email traffic (after all, who needs more email?), you want them to fill out a Form with their question. Then, you and your team are able to record your response in an additional column. Both their questions and your responses appear in a Google Sheet housing the responses.

Solution:

Create a sample Google Sites location that provides some background information on the event, has the Forms link, and displays the responses (as well as any additions you have made). Share the link via social media or email the link to the Sites location to those who need it.

Let’s walk through what this might look like:

Step 1 – Create the Form and Sheets spreadsheet which houses the responses submitted.

To begin, develop your list of information queries. For example, in the case of the classroom scenario, you might want to include queries like the following:

Your First Name

Your Last Name

Your District Email

Staff or Student?

Attend Field Trip?

Once the person has completed the form, they would be shuttled off to the Google Sites location that is to be created in Step 2. In truth, you could probably complete Step 2 first to get the link, or just come back and edit the form. Another key component of this step is to create the Responses form and designate where those responses will appear in a Google Sheet. To verify the form is working, submit a fake response. Once the response has been submitted, you will notice that the Responses Google Sheet has placed your responses beneath a column corresponding to the information queries.

After the last column in your responses, add another column entitled “Status.” In this column, you and/or your team will update the status of each form submitted. In the case of questions, you can type a short response, being sure to set the format for the column to “wrap text.” You will also want to set up notifications on your Google Sheet featuring the responses to the Form so that you receive an email every time the form is completed. Here’s one example with data partially blurred to protect the innocent:

Note: This Sheet’s responses shows the request and status for unblocking content.

Step 2 – Create the Google Site

Create a Sites location with three tabs to include the following:

Home – This tab is your “Welcome” screen that allows you to provide background information for visitors to the Google Sites location.

Ask for Help – This tab includes a link to the “Ask for Help” Google Form. The form is actually embedded in the Google Sites page, enabling visitors to fill it out and submit it without having to leave the Sites location.

Check Status – This tab features an embedded copy of the Google Sheet which houses your responses.

Once your Google Sites location has been created, you can share it with others, even using a URL shortener to make it easier to share.

As you can see, you can add even more information to your Google Sites. But this makes it easy to quickly capture and share information and questions without being inundated via email with people’s requests for assistance. It also more quickly organizes the information for your review, and externalizes it so that anyone you designate can look it up via Google Sites. This eliminates people calling or emailing you repeatedly to ask for the status. And it helps create a knowledge database that facilitates information sharing with interested individuals.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“Being a maker is about having an attitude,” remarked Peggy Reimers (shown left) during a workshop. A reluctant convert to 3D printing, I had often asked myself the question “Why make stuff when you can just order it on Amazon?” That was before I realized how important it is to own again the experience of “making” things, as well as “programming” things. And that idea certainly connects to having the right attitude. As Peggy points out, we need to cultivate a maker’s attitude towards teaching and learning.

Definition of a Maker’s Attitude

As I explore my growing understanding of being “a maker,” I see that a maker’s attitude may be defined by a few key concepts:

A willingness to blend high-tech with hand-made crafts:Often, there is a bias against hand-made crafts, the work we do with our hands. But this bias poorly reflects the reality. Plumbers, electricians, drone handlers, and 3D printing experts make money with this work, often more than those who have earned a college degree. What happens when you combine high-tech with crafts? The power is in designing in one medium (e.g. by hand or digital), then creating in the other. For example, designing a dragon’s head (as Filemon Aldama demonstrates in the image slideshow shown right), then digitizing the physical construction and printing it in 3D.

A willingness to FAIL (First Attempt in Learning): To innovate faster, you have to explore as many paths towards success as you can. While the number of failures increases, so do the opportunities for success. Children know this intuitively; they suffer no loss of face or shame when they fail. As they grow older, though, their fear of failure, of the stigma of missing the mark set by others, mounts until they will do nothing except that which results in success. In some ways, they settle for “success” rather than the “Success” they crave desperately.

A willingness to grow into expertise: It is so easy, when encountering obstacles, to stop moving forward, to shut down and not ask for help. The Internet, however, takes that shame and provides an avenue for those afraid to ask for face-to-face help to now learn virtually, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This means that those with a maker attitude are able to grow slowly, nurtured by a steady stream of videos that help them find their own way to the goal, and accept assistance from online strangers. They find their own path, eschewing the expectation that their every creation look like the factory model that once served as the de facto standard for mass production. Technology makes the mass production of the unique a new standard.

This maker attitude should be readily embraced by teachers who have been forced to lay aside the craft of teaching to engage in formulaic teaching to prepare students for success on high stakes tests. When I served as a teacher, designing a lesson was an act of making. Dr. Judi Harris referred to it as a process of reinvention, adapting another teachers’ lesson plan for one’s own to meet the needs of students, matching our individual style.

In a very real sense, teachers re-invented the wheel for lesson plans. The threat and challenge of digitized curriculum, high-stakes testing threatens the craft of teaching and learning. In a way, the maker movement serves as an outlet to every human’s fundamental need and desire to manifest our uniqueness.

When loading my first design into MakerBot desktop software, it made some adjustments. That helped me realize that my first design was far from perfect.

To illustrate that point, consider the words of these fashion designers, who can innovate and make clothes in their own homes with less pollution:

“With 3D printing, there is no limit to what you can build, and it is this design freedom which makes the technology so exciting by bringing to life what was previously considered to be impossible. This landmark technology allows us as designers to innovate faster and create personalized, ready-to-wear fashion in a digital world with no geometrical constraints and almost zero waste material. We envisage that with further development of the technology, we could 3D print a garment within 24 hours” (source: Science Daily).

The question came to mind again as I read the May 2016 issue of the TCEA TechEdge magazine. In her article Do 3D Printers Belong in Elementary?,Wendy Howk asks, “In a world where many students can buy anything they want, what is the benefit of making?” She goes on to answer her own question:

In order to create, the student must understand concepts deeply. I wanted to harness the interest in 3D printing and see where it could take us as creators.

Where can 3D printing take us as creators? For me, it takes us down a path that builds confidence and helps me develop experience in something that perhaps, I have failed at, but may succeed if I continue.

“Take risks,” shared Christy Cate (ESC-14, @christycate) at the first-ever TCEA Makers event held on May 24, 2016. If there was one take-away, that was it. Amazingly, it’s the same advice offered by Allison Starling at St. Gabriel’s Catholic School in Austin, Texas. Be sure to tune-in to a future podcast to hear them both share their insights!

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Check out these videos for walkthroughs of how to use the virtual Microsoft Classroom environment, as well as different aspects of Classroom, including setting up integration with OneNote Class Notebook.

MS Classroom Big Picture View. In this video, we explore MS Classroom and begin checking out different aspects of MS Classroom. We take a quick look at Assignments, Calendar, etc. We’ll begin exploring Class Notebook and how it interfaces with MS Classroom.

MS Classroom and Setup of OneNote Class Notebook. Setting up OneNote Class Notebook. Continued exploration of MS Classroom, Conversation, File space, and more. We also discuss the different OneNotes that exist, including OneNote Online, OneNote 2016, and the free app, OneNote.

MS Classroom and Connecting OneNote ClassNotebook. In this, we explore Class Notebook in more detail, how to connect your Class Notebook on OneNote 2016 to your MS Classroom Learning Management System (LMS) (as well as others). That way, when you record grades in Class Notebook, they are reflected in your MS Classroom Assignments area, and vice versa!

Exploring the Student View. In this exploration, you get to see what students see when interacting with MS Classroom, as well as creating documents for Assignments. In the video, you see both the teacher and student perspectives as a teacher reviews a student document saved in OneDrive, leaves a comment, then grades it when the students has reviewed it.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

“High-quality OER (Open Education Resources) can save teachers significant time and effort,” points out this article at Edutopia, “on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom. Further, open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration, encourage the improvement of available materials, and aid in the dissemination of best practices.” Given that OER is increasingly available in educationspace, representing various “big players” like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s OpenEd.com, it’s worth taking a look at new offerings in this space.What will these services mean for school districts and teachers? And, more important questions linger, such as, “Should teachers and school districts be trying to create their own content when so much is available online already? If not, who curates OER content?”Let’s explore three current and future sources of open educational resources

“What’s Office 365?” asked a second grade teacher last week at a casual meeting. “My district is moving from what we have now to that.” The transition, of course, was from MS Exchange and web-based email to Office 365. For the school district, moving to Office 365 will result in much greater efficiency and functionality than they have ever enjoyed. But that means this large urban school district has a lot of professional learning to engage in.

If you are a teacher in a district that is launching Office 365 in August, you have some time to get ready. Take these ten steps (five in this blog entry, five more in the sequel) to ensure you are successful in supporting blended learning opportunities that the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires.

1. Ask your administration for a MS Surface tablet or Windows 10 computer to use this summer.

2. Become a Microsoft Innovative Educator.

If you want to successfully use blended technology into classroom learning, the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) training sets you up with the tools and skills you will need. This process (watch this overview video of how to become an MIE Expert) involves you getting a free Office 365 account, which comes with free copies of MS Office 365 Online and OneNote 2016 for Windows (OneNote works on all mobile devices as a program you install or via the web with OneNote Online). You will also get access to Microsoft Education, a website with free professional learning activities that are 100% online. Register for this free training today!

3. Create a OneDrive and Docs.com account.

When working with students and colleagues, you will need to be able to create and share content online. Office 365 grants you free access to Word Online, Powerpoint Online, and Excel Online, as well as OneNote Online and one terabyte of cloud storage in OneDrive. This enables you to share and collaborate with students and colleagues (e.g. teachers working on lesson plans). Once you have completed the MIE training, you will be able to easily interact with content online for creation and sharing.

4. Get to know Microsoft Classroom.

Need a quick overview of Microsoft Classroom? Watch this short video about how a school in Spain is using Microsoft Classroom. Then ask yourself how are you doing this in your classroom?

As you can see, MS Classroom provides an actual environment where you can interact with your students online. What’s more, through the use of tools like OneNote Class Notebook, you can create a Content Library to which you can add class learning resources. Students can then copy items from the Content Library to their OneNote notebook, where they can begin interacting with documents. Microsoft Classroom comes with a Class Notebook built-in, and you can see the main components of a Class Notebook in the image below.

5. Learn from the experts.

“An expert is someone who isn’t afraid to share how they mess things up while they are learning.” That’s my personal definition of what an expert is. While there are many people you can learn from online, consider adding these individuals to your professional learning network (PLN). What’s more, take advantage of TCEA resources listed below. In addition to following the Twitter hashtag, which does not require a Twitter account, #MIEExpert, you can also add these folks to your PLN:

And, of course, follow @mguhlin on Twitter, as well as check out the TCEA Connect! OneNote Online notebook where I share my learning experiences. You will also want to follow the #tceamie hashtag online.

6. Digitize your print documents.

Tired of dealing with paper? Your students are as well! Take advantage of MS Office Lens app (available on Android, iOS, and later this summer, Windows) to digitize documents and go paperless with OneNote. You simply start the app, take pictures of the paper, and it organizes it into pictures or a PDF file or enables you to save it to OneNote for easy sharing with students. Or alternatively, use the built-in capture of OneNote app on your mobile device of choice. Make it a goal to digitize your documents during the summer and avoid the time sink during the school year. Once you have a digital copy, you caneasily annotate (draw/write on it) in OneNote.

You have access to a global cadre of Microsoft Innovative Educators and Experts, all eager to coach you on how to transform teaching and learning in your classroom. This means you are not alone in blazing a trail in your teaching, learning, and leading environment. Our children are learning directly from YouTube, so why not get inspired in the same way to make your classroom learning environment even more engaging than it is now? For example, you can see tutorial videos for MS Sway,Office 365 in the Classroom, OneNote Class Notebook, and many more.

9. Manipulate Portable Document Format (PDF) files to save paper.

Are you accessing materials from Lead4ward and other online PDF documents? Instead of printing everything, you can quickly split PDFs, printing only what you need. Use the no-cost PDFSAM Basic.

Are you doing awesome things in your classroom? If you and your students are learning, then the answer is “YES!” Why not record audio into a OneNote, describing a picture or screenshot of a student artifact? Then,students, parents, and others can access that OneNote Online to listen to student reflections about that artifact.

Teaching in a Microsoft-empowered classroom can be much more than just being about the technology. It really is about the transformations your students can accomplish with information, converting it into knowledge that is useful and meaningful to them.

Earlier this school year, I had the chance to sit and record a podcast with April Wagner while we were both attending the incomparable Tots & Technology 2016 Conference in Galveston, Tx. Please allow me to cross-post a selection of the blog entry that appeared originally at TCEA’s Technotes blog on 07/05/2016.

Welcome to TCEA MIE Podcast #2! In these conversations, we explore how educators are using Microsoft tools to achieve instructional objectives. At the Tots and Technology 2016 Conference in Galveston, Texas, I had the opportunity to connect with April Wagner. April provides assistance to teachers of students in grades 4-6. She models how to use Office 365 tools in the classroom. In today’s chat, she shares how easily tools like OneNote can be used to collect information and share it with students’ parents.

Have you heard about these Microsoft tools? When I first heard about them, I was shocked. I had spent so much time looking in one direction that I failed to realize the rich ecosystem of tools that Microsoft has built that can enhance teaching, learning, and leading.

Docs.com enables you to keep organize and share your creations with others. Those creations can include Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Office Mix, as well as Sways, PDFs, and OneNote notebooks. Once you publish them, anyone can see them and get them. Docs.com also allows you to create “journal” entries that are actually Sways, featuring images, videos, and text.

You can organize anything you publish on Docs.com, as well as stuff from other people, as “collections” and make those available. And after publishing a certain amount of documents, you can get your own web address. What’s more, Docs.com also includes analytics that track how many views/visitors you have had to your content. For an example, check out mine.

Learning application: Publish templates for OneNote notebooks or Sways for students/staff to get and modify, then re-publish those via Docs.com for others. Or publish a Sway as a newsletter that anyone can read online.

While video reigns supreme for screencasting, there are times when you simply want to capture a screenshot, annotate it, and record audio about that annotation. If that is the case, then MS Snip may be what works best for you.

Learning Application:As students turn in more work in digital format, use Snip to annotate (write on, highlight in various colors) and record your reflections. And invite students to do the same with each other’s work.

With Skype Translator, the world becomes more understandable. Skype’s online translator can “help you communicate in 7 languages for voice calls, and in more than 50 languages while instant messaging.” It works on Windows 7 and above. With it, you also have access to Skype, which enables you to contact others around the world at no cost. You can also have group calls with a maximum of 25 people, although the Skype for Business/Education version allows for more.

Learning Application: In a second language class, encourage students to use Skype Translator for multi-language interactions with other classrooms around the world. You can rely on Mystery Skype to make connections with diverse cultures in distant locales.

Tool #4 – Microsoft Edge Browser

Looking for uncluttered, white space-friendly web pages? Or maybe you want to save items for reading later or annotate the site, highlighting key ideas? While today’s web pages often pack a ton of content into each pixel your students look at on their devices, the MS Edge browser makes it easy to turn off superfluous content, save it for later reading, and annotate it. In addition to reading view, you can also save web pages for later reading, which are synchronized across all Windows 10 devices like MS Surface tablets and computers.

Need to take notes on a web page? Not a problem! Whatever annotations you make can be saved directly to your OneNote notebook (such as a Class Notebook you are using with your students), Favorites, or Reading List!

Learning Application: Encourage students to publish their creations online, then interact with the content other students have created, adding their feedback and annotations.

Tool #5 – OneNote’s Digital Ink to Text Conversion

At a conference earlier this year, I experimented with handwriting my notes directly on my Surface tablet, then converted the notes to text using the “Ink to Text” option in OneNote. What an incredible feeling to see my hastily scrawled notes find expression as typed text!

Across multiple experiments, students who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops.

And, since my Mom introduced me to the idea of a “pilón,” which means in Spanish to throw in an extra one for free, allow me to offer one more:

Tool #6 – Get Office 365 Free for Teachers and Students

If you are a teacher or student, even if your school district has not yet adopted Office 365 tools, you can get Microsoft Office Suite, online version plus one terabyte of storage, for free! All you need is your school district email account to get started. This is great since OneNote 2016 is available for free and you’ll need the Microsoft account to get take advantage of other special offers. And, of course, this will also give you access to the Microsoft Education portal.

What learning applications can YOU imagine with Microsoft Education tools?

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

People will look over my shoulder when I’m checking my email and, with wonder in their voices, ask, “How is it that you have so few emails?” Achieving Inbox Zero is a personal goal of mine. I loathe clutter, both in my office space and in my email inbox. While creativity flourishes when you juxtapose strange ideas and resources, I like to keep the inbox clear except when I’m actively pursuing the will-o-wisp of innovation. OneNote’s “email it in” function makes that possible.

If you’re wondering how to quickly email content to your OneNote Notebook of choice, it’s not too difficult. You can get there by following these steps. But first, let’s explore why you would want to do this. Here are some reasons:

Setup a OneNote to receive emailed assignments from students. Have a class set of iPads? Put a “class@mydistrict.net” email on them as the default, and this will enable your students to email their creations into OneNote for easy project capture.

Email important documents and correspondence directly into OneNote. One way of achieving Inbox Zero is to eliminate the unnecessary and sort the “must-keep” into OneNote for long-term storage.

Drop receipts into OneNote. You can take a photo of receipts and save them to OneNote or you can just email them to “me@onenote.com” and in the Subject line, put @Receipts to see them magically appear in the appropriate section.

Forward e-newsletters into OneNote for easy access and prevent your email inbox from becoming a repository of information.

Take advantage of OneNote’s built-in search capability to find your emails and content. You can also tag that content to make it easier to find. For student projects, tag their work by name, class period, and year (1516mguhlin_period2), and finding student work will be a snap!

Use IFTTT to drop important emails into OneNote. With the right recipe, you can save content directly from your email into the appropriate OneNote Notebook section.

Curious about Inbox Zero concept and want some more principles? Check out this preso which relies on the wisdom of Kyle Chowning, 3 Quick Steps to a Zero Inbox. Here’s what my personal inbox looks like…I still have 2 additional labels to capture all the list emails I get from various sources (e.g. GCT=Google Certified Trainer/Innovator)

Now that you know a few reasons why emailing into OneNote is so useful, let’s walk through the process together.

Once you have clicked on the button “Set up email to OneNote” above, you will see this screen:

Notice that your email address is reflected above. This is the email address from which you can send emails and they will be routed automatically to your default notebook and section. In my case above, you can see my default notebook is “MGPersonal5” and the section is “Quick Notes.”

The site also offers the suggestion of including the “@” symbol followed by the section name at the end of your email subject line.

This makes working with content from your email quite easy. Of course, if you are running OneNote 2016 on your computer, you can take advantage of several keyboard shortcuts that make working with content simple, as well as adding content. For example, Windows + S key will allow you to clip a page for inclusion in a OneNote page. This makes it ridiculously easy to capture content on your computer and then include it in a OneNote page.

Relying on OneNote to do the heavy-lifting of keeping track of your precious work and resources can be an organizational boon. Instead of email and Google Drive documents (Where IS that document saved?), you can take advantage of OneNote’s multi-notebook search features to find content quickly and easily.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

When I first participated in Joe Lambert’s digital storytelling workshop, my father had just passed away. Creating a digital story,Garbed in Silver, a combination of narrative and images, helped me cope with the grief of his death. It also helped me reconnect with some of my best memories, allowing me to create a remembrance for my young son that endures today on YouTube and Teachercast video hosting sites. Digital storytelling can be a powerful way to connect with others. In this blog entry, we explore digital storytelling resources and tips.

1) Finding Digital Storytelling Resources

Looking for digital storytelling resources? There are quite a few available online. Here are my top three favorites:

Each of these contains digital stories that connect at a visceral level. And some, like We Are StoryMakers, invites the work of writers, actors, and media enthusiasts to create with a simple directive: you have five minutes to create a narrative and then record it.

2) Storytelling Keys

“In oral culture,” shares Joe Lambert, “we humans learned to retain stories as epigrams, or little tales that had a meaningful proverb at the end. In our current culture, many of us have not developed an epigrammatic learning equivalent to these processes.” Yet it’s not just about creating stories that are entertaining; it is about creating stories that transform us. As Vyasa says, “If you listen carefully, at the end, you’ll be someone else.” To accomplish that, I like to think that stories engage both our experience and beliefs, as Gretchen Bernabei demonstrates in this image, and helps us reflect and transform our perception of what has happened in our lives.

There are various approaches to storytelling. The oral storytelling approach focuses on a beginning event, a middle with multiple events, each summarized by an image that captures our attention, until it reaches a turning point, moves to falling action, and ends. This story structure can be used for a lot more than just oral storytelling, of course. To prepare for this type of approach, Joe Lambert suggests creating a “memory box.”

Of course, it is easier to collect images, videos, and sound in one virtual space (e.g. Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox) than ever before. A few tools I recommend for creating a digital memory box include the following:

OneNote + Office Lens: These two free apps, which work on a multitude of mobile devices, allow you to store text, audio, images, and embed videos, and could easily be used to collect information. The Office Lens app lets you digitize content, snap a picture of paper items or photos, and save them to OneNote, a digital notebook. With OneNote’s built-in digital ink, students can easily fill in the chart and storyboard their digital story. The teacher can take those student creations, combine them with the final products, and publish them on Docs.com as a OneNote Notebook (which is free for everyone and works great on iPads, Chromebooks, Windows/Mac computers, and Android).

Google Photos + Google Drive: With these two apps, you can save photos or videos taken with your device to Google Photos, saving content online. Google Drive offers unlimited hosting for GoogleApps for Education (GAFE) users, so you can easily drop videos and images there.

3) Find Photos That Make You Care

“Is that your son?” asked a friend when I showed him the digital story I had made of my Dad. The picture showed my son, perched like a king, in my Dad’s lap. Both were grinning, the picture such an attention grabber that even now I find it hard to look away. If you are looking for examples of photos that hold your gaze, check out the IPPAwards.com site. You can also find a wealth of images in free, public domain, or available for re-use online.

4) Combine Images and Audio into a Digital Story

“Little strokes” said Benmin Franklin “fell great oaks.” Epigrams like this one powerfully send the message that you have achieved something, overcome adversity if it comes at the end of your digital story. If you can’t make one up, find the right epigram to borrow, properly cited, of course. Practice telling your story aloud, using the pictures as your guideposts; keep your wisdom brief.

Apps like Shadow Puppet EDU, Adobe Voice, and Storymaker 2, as well as MS Office Mix (Windows/Mac) enable you to combine content in powerful ways. The process is straightforward, but the key lies in creating epigrams that will stick in people’s minds. Include music only if it enhances your story; otherwise let your voice, or silence, and images make the message clear.

Conclusion

All of us are carrying countless stories in our mobile devices, in the moments that we felt compelled to capture with a camera. And those moments call to our spirit, seeking to liberate words that lay afraid in our minds. Digital stories can set you free

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

At a recent #TxEduChat, one of the questions asked was “How do school leaders go about equipping educators through professional development in a way that leads to authentic empowerment?” That’s a tremendously powerful question, so let’s explore how the strategic application of technology can lead to authentic empowerment.

Tip #1 – Amplify Teachers’ Voices in Campus Decisions

“You want me to be a member of the campus site-based committee?” I asked my principal. As a third-year teacher, I wasn’t looking forward to spending time sitting in after-school meetings. Yet in those meetings with my principal, I never felt like my voice was heard; rather, it was muted, too soft-spoken for meetings where few knew what would happen as a consequence of a decision. With mobile apps like Skype(10 Ways Teachers Motivate and Empower with Skype), Appear.in, and Voxer (read stories here of educational uses), campus leaders can create a no-cost virtual space to connect and quickly share ideas. In these spaces, quiet voices are amplified because, while the talkers may speak, the quiet educators can be heard in equal measure.

Tip #2 – Deepen Relationships

“Miguel,” asked the Athletic Director for the eleventh time since the start of the school year, “when is the FitnessGram data file going to be uploaded so we can conduct our assessments?” Unfortunately, the delay was that this program was in the midst of change. I accurately reported updates, if any, and followed up. When the information finally was released earlier, I was no longer employed in the district. But I made sure the Athletic Director had the information. We had started this journey together and it only made sense to finish it. Make the effort to be consistent, be predictable, share relevant resources that connect to people’s needs, and, by doing that, you build trust.

When we look at deepening relationships, we’re actually concerned with building trust. When we think of campus and/or district culture, we often think of the face-to-face interactions that people have in shared spaces. Having the right technology in place can help augment the positive connections that occur in those shared spaces. But deepening trust is really a person-to-person activity, isn’t it?

Tip #3 – Promote Quality Professional Development Opportunities

Looking for quality professional development? While there are many learning opportunities, including unconferences and #edcamps, YouTube videos, blogs, and just-in-time social media (e.g. Periscope, Voxer, Blab.im), you can always count on TCEA professional development learning and opportunities. From member-centric Lunch-n-Learn and Get Your Google Onwebinars, as well as a host of certification courses for 21st Century Administrators and Campus Technology Specialists, Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) courses, Chromebook and iPad academies, and IT Director courses in face-to-face and virtual spaces, TCEA has a lot to offer. You can find tons of resources online from TCEA’s directors of professional development, each of whom is committed to learning and sharing with and for you and is also a former educator. As an example, here is my collection of resources in a OneNote Notebook, TCEA Connect! (Aren’t OneNote Notebooks awesome?)

And you can join various Diigo groups that are focused on sharing great resources for all interested learners (not just members). For example, consider joining the 3D Printing Diigo group, which features a wide variety of resources for 3D printing. Or join the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) group (and take advantage of upcoming training dates).

Authentic empowerment happens when you connect people together so they can collaborate with each other. Consider developing what Amy “@friedtechnology” Mayer suggests are individualized technology plans for teachers. These “ITPs” help close the learning gap.

And you know what? Everything shared in this blog entry can accelerate learning for teachers. If you accelerate teacher learning, you impact student learning. Isn’t that amazing? No, it’s TCEA amazing!

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Note: This blog entry originally published at the TCEA TechNotes blog! Read it for more links and resources!

Looking for an easy to use tool that makes collecting, curating and sharing student work from tablets simple? Then Seesaw is a solution worth exploring.

At the Tots and Technology Conference held in Galveston, Texas in June, TCEA member Brittany Adcock shared her experienceusing Seesaw, which bills itself as a student-driven digital portfolio solution. Seesaw works on Android and iOS devices (e.g. iPads), making it an incredible tool to simplify and streamline content sharing by students. In the past, students and teachers encountered limits to their sharing. The app works quite easily (check tutorials online) in this way:

The teacher creates an account on the Seesaw website, setting up a class.

The teacher prints out a flyer emailed to her by Seesaw containing a QR code, then hangs that flyer on the wall where students will be working.

Students who are ready to submit their work open the app on their device, select the “I’m a student” button, and then scan the QR code on the flyer. They will then be given a choice to add a variety of content, including video, audio, text, web links, or images/video from the device’s Camera Roll (iOS).

Once students have submitted their work, the teacher can decide to approve it for inclusion in the Class Learning Journal, which is viewable by all students in the class today.

Teachers can also create a Seesaw-based blog, and adding content to the website is as easy as clicking a globe beneath a student’s creation.

A digital portfolio that collects students’ digital and physical work in one place. Everything is organized, making grading and conferences easier! A space that each student can “own” with built-in tools that make it easy for them to capture learning, reflect, and learn new skills. A parent communication tool that seamlessly shares what’s going on in your classroom and builds a strong school-home community.

After creating paper slide videos, learners saved those video creations to their Camera Roll. These were shared via the Seesaw blog (view blogcreated with products from a Lubbock workshop onTablets in the ELL Classroom, as well as theBecoming a Storymakerpre-conference session).After exploring Seesaw in the context of professional development sessions for adult learners, here are three ways that my session participants took advantage of the app:

Since learners were working in Star Trek-themed teams, they submitted their work to “Away Team: Janeway” (a reference to Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek Voyager television series; other captains included Captains Archer, Kirk, Hernandez and Uhura). This organized student work by their group, rather than just an individual submission.

Students created content with PicCollage, web links, and Notes and then submitted it.

3. A versatile solution for collecting work on tablets, TCEA member Karen Balbier (El Paso ISD) shared that she uses the app to collect work from participants in her professional learning sessions, and in turn, asks them to share their K-12 students’ best work for inclusion. An innovative use of a technology intended for students, adapted for adult learners,

Seesaw is a sensational tool for facilitating collecting, curating, and sharing work created on tablets.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Today, we’ll hear about how one teacher, Yvonne Clark (@yclarkhhs) from Henderson ISD, is using Google Sites as a way to house ePortfolios.

Thanks for listening to this TCEA podcast featuring Yvonne Clark (@yclarkhhs) from Henderson ISD. You can find a copy of the show notes online at www.tcea.org/blog, which is the TCEA TechNotes Blog, recently recognized by EdTech magazine as one of the top 50 blogs to read in 2016!

Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to travel to the TCEA Tots and Technology Conference taking place in Galveston, Texas for elementary educators. When I attend conferences like this one, it can be overwhelming to process all the information that’s being shared. That’s why I took a few moments to start up the Voxer app and interview folks on the way to TCEA Tots. Below, you’ll find short “voxercasts.” The Voxer app makes it easy to record content and then quickly share it. I bookmarked the Tweets where I shared the Voxercasts and you can subscribe to the #TCEATots Voxercasts RSS feed via the Diigo social bookmarking tool.

Note: This was originally posted at the TCEA TechNotes’ blog, for whom I author blog entries sharing my experiences as a TCEA Director of Professional Development. Is that cool or what?!? 🙂

These TCEA Tots voxercasts really help capture the flavor of this fantastic conference geared to teachers of young children. Note that links below will open to a Voxer page.

Be sure to check back for even more interviews from TCEA Tots and Technology 2016 in Galveston, Texas. And if you want more learning for elementary educators, consider joining us for the Tots Frisco conference July 24-26.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Thank you for listening in on the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator SkypeChat! This is the first in a series of Skype conversations with movers and shakers, educators blending Microsoft technologies into teaching, learning, and leading. My name is Miguel Guhlin (@mguhlin) and I am your host for the TCEA MIE SkypeChat. You can find more information online in the notes for this show at www.tcea.org/blog, as well as here.

On May 26, 2016, Dr. Tom Grissom (@tomgrissom) took a few minutes out of his busy schedule preparing teachers at Eastern Illinois University. Tom serves Eastern Illinois as the Director of the Instructional Technology Center (ITC for short). If his voice sounds familiar, you may have heard him via the TechTalk4Teachers podcast. You can access his podcasts on a variety of topics online here.

I approached Tom about one of his presentations, Exploring Doc-casting. Now, if you’re not familiar with Docs.com, a relatively new service from Microsoft, which Tom points out is about a year old from the time I recorded this conversation in May, 2016, it is a great service that allows you to publish resources there. I encountered Docs.com purely by accident while trying to share resources with TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educators (TCEA MIE – http://ly.tcea.org/tceamie1) and was immediately impressed with its features. Consider Pip Cleaves, an educator who shares her perspective on Docs.com:

I work in a middle years school in Inner West Sydney that is running a successful BYOD program. I wanted a way to share a student diary with our student population of approximately 900 students. I didn’t want to share; rather, I wanted to deliver a stand-alone OneNote notebook to any platform.

If you haven’t seen Angela’s Liberate Genius resources, you should definitely check them out. They stretch your mind about how to use tools like OneNote and Docs.com together. In our conversation, Tom and I explore some of the actual uses he has for Docs.com, OneNote.com, and Microsoft Sway.

Let’s go back in time to when Tom first began exploring Docs.com…

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Are you a…learner? Teacher? Leader? Innovator? Take advantage of the no-cost TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) academies taking place throughout Texas over the next few months. TCEA and Microsoft have partnered to make these professional learning opportunities available to anyone, member or non-member, FREE! Find a location near you at the list appearing at the bottom of this blog entry.

What is the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator Academy?

The newly re-designed TCEA MIE one-day academies provide participants with specific instructions and suggestions for blending technology into the classroom curriculum. Some of the topics include:

Organize classroom lessons for students that allow them anytime, anywhere access to embedded videos and content, great for flipped learning opportunities.

Develop web-based forms to capture real data from respondents and then aggregate data for analysis.

Connect with educators, students, and others via international connections using tools like Skype.

Explore a wealth of lesson plans and ideas that help you meet ESSA expectations for blended learning using technology.

Learn how to create resources and easily share them with others via the web.

Attendees will have the opportunity to craft powerful conversations about learning in a hyper-connected world, as well as receive hands-on practice and modeling with Office 365 for Education tools like OneNote, Docs.com, Sway, Office Mix, and Office Forms.

Note: Did you know that when you attend the TCEA MIE one-day academy, you receive access to a OneNote Notebook, which you can read on any device, chock-full of curated content, video tutorials, articles, and more?

But wait, there’s even more! AFTER the TCEA MIE session, you will have the opportunity to join the TCEA MIE Diigo Community, an online group open to all regardless of whether you are a TCEA member or not.

And, if that wasn’t enough, you are also invited to participate in the upcoming TCEA MIE SkypeChats that will begin in August 2016 with special guests. In the meantime, join the TCEA MIE SkypeChat and get access to sneak previews of audio interviews with MIE practitioners.

Thank you for listening in on the TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator SkypeChat! This is the first in a series of Skype conversations with movers and shakers, educators blending Microsoft technologies into teaching, learning, and leading. My name is Miguel Guhlin (@mguhlin) and I am your host for the TCEA MIE SkypeChat. You can find more information online in the notes for this show at www.tcea.org/blog, as well as here.

On May 26, 2016, Dr. Tom Grissom (@tomgrissom) took a few minutes out of his busy schedule preparing teachers at Eastern Illinois University. Tom serves Eastern Illinois as the Director of the Instructional Technology Center (ITC for short). If his voice sounds familiar, you may have heard him via the TechTalk4Teachers podcast. You can access his podcasts on a variety of topics online here.

I approached Tom about one of his presentations, Exploring Doc-casting. Now, if you’re not familiar with Docs.com, a relatively new service from Microsoft, which Tom points out is about a year old from the time I recorded this conversation in May, 2016, it is a great service that allows you to publish resources there. I encountered Docs.com purely by accident while trying to share resources with TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educators (TCEA MIE – http://ly.tcea.org/tceamie1) and was immediately impressed with its features. Consider Pip Cleaves, an educator who shares her perspective on Docs.com:

I work in a middle years school in Inner West Sydney that is running a successful BYOD program. I wanted a way to share a student diary with our student population of approximately 900 students. I didn’t want to share; rather, I wanted to deliver a stand-alone OneNote notebook to any platform.

If you haven’t seen Angela’s Liberate Genius resources, you should definitely check them out. They stretch your mind about how to use tools like OneNote and Docs.com together. In our conversation, Tom and I explore some of the actual uses he has for Docs.com, OneNote.com, and Microsoft Sway.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

In June, 2016, I had the opportunity to travel to the TCEA Tots and Technology Conference taking place in Galveston, Texas for elementary educators. When I attend conferences like this one, it can be overwhelming to process all the information that’s being shared.

That’s why I took a few moments to start up the Voxer app and interview folks on the way to TCEA Tots. Below, you’ll find short “voxercasts.” The Voxer app makes it easy to record content and then quickly share it.

These TCEA Tots voxercasts really help capture the flavor of this fantastic conference geared to teachers of young children. Note that links below will open to a Voxer page.

Seven Tots and Technology Voxercasts:

Green Screen Tips from Dr. Bruce Ellis – This conversation really blew my mind, so to speak, and sharing the tips Dr. Ellis included in his overview of green screen tips caught the attention of pre-conference attendees in my Become a Storymakersession.

GeoGuesser with Dr. Bruce Ellis – This conversation expands on social studies/geography connections possible with GeoGuesser, a Google feature I had never heard of. In fact, when I spoke with Lampasas ISD teachers who were presenting on virtual field trips and geo-related activities, they did not know about it either.

iPad Sharing Made Easy (Part 1) with Miguel Guhlin – This conversation has me sharing about iPads and getting information out there. I highlight several apps, including Readdle Documents and Seesaw. This is a two-part series since we were having too much fun, and Part 2 also mentioned Android.

Collaborative Grant Writing (Part 1 and Part 2)– This was an enlightening session regarding crowdfunding (e.g. DonorsChoose) with Brandi (@aesfinearts) and Mandy Bryan (@mandyrbryan) and collaborative grant writing tools. It resulted in two parts.

Be sure to check back for even more interviews from TCEA Tots and Technology 2016 in Galveston, Texas. And if you want more learning for elementary educators, consider joining TCEA for the Tots Frisco conference July 24-26.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

In a storm of reflection and foggy thinking, I had lots of fun writing the first two installments of a new series for TCEA’s TechNotes blog–The Self-Transmediated Learner. The blog series came as a result of two realizations:

Millennials and Gen Z learners adapt themselves to technology, while teachers try to adapt technology to their needs.

Learners that know how to navigate multiple technological systems enjoy the same privileges of adults.

It seems obvious to me now, but I would love a conversation with other folks who might have an opinion on this.

“My principal wants me to use anchor charts, or at least, hang some on the walls” an experienced teacher told me recently. “I’m just not sure I get the value.” I immediately started to explain why anchor charts are so important, and then sputtered to a stop, like a car running out of gas, realizing that I could not articulate why they were beneficial. In this blog entry, let’s explore the benefits of anchor charts, phrase walls, and technology for use in English Language Learner (ELL) classrooms. Of course, these approaches work for monolingual classes as well.